


the 1

by rachelamberish



Series: folklore [3]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Bottom Eddie Kaspbrak, Drug Use, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Top Richie Tozier, angst ™, big dick richie 2: electric boogaloo, did i write this in a month-long depression haze? who knows! you can't prove anything, every fic in this series can and should be read on its own, i'm back on my folklore bullshit everyone!!!!, the1.mp3, we're talking coping with confusing emotions brought on by nostalgia, we're talking existential loneliness, we're talking submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:34:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26934439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelamberish/pseuds/rachelamberish
Summary: (i guess you never know, never know; and it's another day waking up alone)“La petite mort,”Eddie remembers suddenly, from some book he’d read back in college. He whispers it into the dark, quiet living room, not really expecting it to be heard.Richie rolls over half-asleep, his nose once again grazing the space between Eddie’s neck and shoulder.“What’s that?” he mumbles, clearly not really aware of what he’s saying, or probably even that it’s Eddie he’s talking to.Eddie dips into quiet, deciding how to answer him.“It’s French,” Eddie settles on.Because Richie didn’t need to know.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: folklore [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1855267
Comments: 28
Kudos: 145





	the 1

**Author's Note:**

> i can't be held responsible for what i write when it's been months since i've written anything. i get craaazzyyyy
> 
> this is feral. this is truly feral. i'm sorry if this gives you depression and if you have depression i'm sorry if this exacerbates it.
> 
> this is maybe stretching the definition of what a one-shot is but fuck it i make the rules babey!!! 50k one-shot here we come!!!
> 
> no i'm just kidding. or am i.
> 
> anyway thank you all for waiting very patiently for me to update this series. it means a lot. <3
> 
> ***every fic in this series is meant to be read on its own. they do not tie into each other.

Eddie stands waist-deep in the waters of the quarry and watches the ripples of the water as they pass through him and his friends in soft silence and fade out towards the cliff edge. He thinks he sees his reflection there, but he can’t be sure. He isn’t sure he would recognize it anymore.

When he turns back, Ben and Bev have dove beneath the surface, and Bill is off on his own, and Mike is cleaning his face with the water and smiling up at the sun, but Richie remains like a pillar, staring back.

There’s a lot that Eddie Kaspbrak is no longer sure of. He’s not sure of the hard lines on his face or the gray strands in his hair, or his 9 to 5, or his Chevy Tahoe, or even the ring on his finger. He’s not sure what it means that he’s bathing in the quarry, and doesn’t care that the water is murky and doesn’t think about what diseases he might get from it.

He’s sure what it means, though, when Richie stares at him now.

He could ignore it. He could play the same game now that they played at when they were teenagers. But something tells him he won’t.

Maybe it’s something in the water.

They mostly dry in the sun. But for what’s left, Mike pulls towels out of his car back at the town house. Ben wraps his around Beverly, and he pulls her in, and they kiss and they don’t seem to care who they’re in full-view of anymore. Some of his friends filter away, towards the town house. It’s strange how they all move now. Like a pack of ghosts.

Eddie takes his and scrubs at the hair towards the nape of his neck. He’s not scrubbing fiercely, until he’s clean—until all the caked-on blood and dirt has left him, like he might’ve before—he’s scrubbing idly, because the shock of it all has left him numb, and it’s the only thing he can think of to do.

He glances up. Richie leans against the side of his Porsche and watches him back; eyes soft like Eddie’s never, ever seen them. Like he can’t even believe.

And now he’s walking over here.

Eddie’s back straightens like a rod. He breathes in sharp. His voice breaks when he manages:

“Richie, I, um—”

Richie takes the towel out of Eddie’s limp hand, and he bunches it up and makes a tip, and with one big palm gripping Eddie’s neck he takes the towel and wipes at something on Eddie’s cheek until it’s gone. Then he takes it and tosses it into Mike’s backseat.

“You had a little…” Richie trails off into an explanatory thought that both of them know doesn’t fucking matter.

Eddie nods.

Richie stares. Studies. Eddie fights it by trying to look away and it probably shows.

“You okay?” Richie’s asking.

Eddie stares at some point in the distance; some tree.

“I don’t know,” he says honestly, after some thought. “It all…just…”

“Yeah,” Richie breathes. “I know.” Then he swallows. “But you’re, uh…still breathing? You got all your limbs?”

Eddie nods again.

“Good. That’s…good.”

Eddie looks down at his feet.

“Well, I, um…” he gestures towards the town house, trying to explain that it’s his next destination, even though he doesn’t know why, and is just sort of going through the motions. Richie stops him.

“You wanna get out of here?” he asks, like it’s simple. He moves his head in a gesture back towards his car.

Eddie’s mouth stays open a second too long. He catches himself.

“D-Derry?”

“Yeah, maybe.” Richie shrugs. “Who needs it?”

“B—” Eddie blinks. “But I’ve got…stuff…” he thinks of his many suitcases stacked neatly in his room, which all seem so trivial now.

“What stuff?” Richie smirks, like he knows.

Eddie no longer thinks it’s boyish and stupid and teasing, when he does it now, though. That smirk. For some reason it feels so much better than that. Because it’s Richie, and it’s easy, and simple, and lazy, and just a tinge suggestive—which is what it’s always been, really. So, it shouldn’t be remarkable except for the fact that…it’s…the first touch of normalcy Eddie’s seen or felt in…God, maybe twenty-seven years. The first true feeling that things are maybe what they should be.

And the fact that Richie smirks now— _now_ , of all times, after everything they’ve just seen, and he does it for Eddie and for no one else—and it can still look like…like _that_ , when he does it—well, shit, that’s…

_Hot?_

Eddie blinks as it strikes him.

Yeah. Hot. It’s what he…it’s what he would think of, if and when he thought of that word. It’s hot. He doesn’t usually think about it so consciously.

…Huh.

Eddie doesn’t know how he agrees to whatever it is Richie is proposing, but he does. With some nod of his head or barely-words escaping his mouth or just by following him blindly back to his car. Whatever he does, it happens.

Richie rolls the windows and the top down and they drive in the breeze as the sun sets, and Richie blasts music through the speakers. The wind moves through his hair, snapping it in all directions and Eddie watches, enraptured.

They make a stop on their way to wherever-the-hell.

It’s the kissing bridge, Eddie recognizes as Richie pulls the car to a slow, gradual stop, and brings AC/DC all the way down low.

Richie breathes out, like he’s letting out all the air in his body, like a slowly deflating balloon. He’s staring down at the stick shift, not looking at Eddie in the silence.

“I gotta show you something,” he says, and Eddie is profoundly affected by it. One, because it is so transparently, nakedly nervous in a way Richie never is. Two, because it’s Richie, and he’s brought him _here_ , of all places, and Eddie doesn’t understand it yet but he knows that something’s up. And three, because Richie’s voice sounds…not…Richie. Not like it _couldn’t_ be Richie, but like…it’s never _been_ Richie. Richie has never sounded like this before. Richie has never let the layers fall this deep. Richie has never brought this wall down between them. Eddie remembers now, and he remembers all of it—or well enough to know that this is true. Well enough to remember the way that he and Richie communicated was always frustrating, and never this raw, or this genuine.

Eddie blinks away the sheen in his eyes. “Okay.”

Richie gets out of the car. Eddie follows.

Richie walks ahead with his hands in his pockets and Eddie watches the lines of his body shift with each step. Richie stops at some seemingly nondescript point, and turns, and breathes, and faces the bridge.

Eddie stops too, and follows the line of his eyes.

“I would’ve told you. I would’ve…said…I just…didn’t, and I…I’m sorry.” Richie’s voice quakes; _shivers._

“…Oh.”

He can hear Richie swallow behind him. But he doesn’t see it, because Eddie’s eyes haven’t moved since they landed on that spot on the bridge.

“Do you hate me?”

Eddie moves his head slowly, back and forth.

“No.”

“Why not?”

It’s…a little angry, the way Richie says it.

Eddie’s brow furrows. He turns.

“Why would I hate you?”

“Bec—” Richie huffs in frustration. “Don’t do that. Come on. Just…fuck. Let me have it, alright.”

It’s Eddie’s turn to get irritated. “Let you have _what?”_

Richie’s eyes are glossy. All of Eddie’s thoughts stop, and every word he’s ever thought of speaking is stuck in the lump in his throat because _Richie’s eyes are glossy._

“What do you want from me, man?” Richie chokes. “Alright, I—I—I bring you out here to confess, you know, to—to—to let go of this shit that’s been eating me up inside for thirty fuckin’ years, and you’re just gonna—you’re just gonna stand there and say _nothing?_ I’m flailing in the wind here, Eddie, I—come on, man, that’s cruel—” Richie’s voice breaks more at the end.

“I haven’t said nothing, I’m just not fuckin’ mad at you! What the fuck’s the matter with you? Why did you think I’d be—?”

“Oh, give me a _fucking break!”_

_“What?!”_

“I lied to you!”

“What lie?!”

“That I—that I didn’t—” Richie gestures at him vaguely “That all I wanted from you was—”

Eddie waits; looks at Richie expectantly.

“That I was straight!” Richie settles on.

“What did you want from me?” Eddie goes back to. Maybe that’s even crueler. That he won’t let him escape that slip.

Richie’s mouth falls open. Then his big jaw clicks.

“All of it. Whatever.”

Eddie doesn’t know what that means, so he shows that on his face.

“And what do you want now?”

Richie gets quiet.

“’M sorry,” is all he says in answer.

There is a long silence, as Eddie thinks he understands.

“Thank you,” Eddie says eventually. “For…telling me.”

“Yeah,” Richie says, and it sounds like he forces the sound out of him.

They get back in the car.

There is no music anymore. Richie grips one hand on the steering wheel, white-knuckled. Eddie twiddles his thumbs and looks down at his lap.

It’s some stoplight. And Eddie knows that Richie is heading back into town and not away from it like he’d said, because he probably thinks that that’s what Eddie wants.

That starts to get him upset. And as soon as he realizes why, he reaches over and with one hand pulls Richie’s face towards his until their mouths are pressed firmly together.

Richie just as quickly pushes him away—smacks his hands away, forcefully places them back on Eddie’s side of the car.

“Stop. Fuckin’—stop. You can’t be doing that.”

“The car’s stopped,” Eddie says, playing dumb.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what do you—”

“You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?” Richie spits as he starts accelerating again. “That’s not funny.”

“It…wasn’t a joke.”

“Shut up. Just shut—” Richie squeezes his eyes tight, like he’s willing the memory of the kiss from his mind. “I told you to have it out with me on the bridge, if you gotta. Don’t do it like this. Please don’t fucking—”

“I love you,” Eddie tells him, voice thick with how much he— _God,_ he means it.

He expects Richie to stop talking then, he really does. Expects him to be at a loss for words. Expects his eyes to grow soft like they were before and expects that to be the end of the conversation.

Instead, immediately, nearly before he can get the last word out, it’s met with—

“Yeah, alright, dickhead, you’re straight. You’re straight and you’re married. Fuck you. Y’know, that is so fuckin’ mean that you would—”

“Stop the car.”

“What?”

“Stop the fucking car!” Eddie shouts now over the sound of the wind in their ears. “I wanna get out.”

“The hell are you talking about—"

But Richie’s slowing down as they reach a stop sign anyway, so Eddie just opens the passenger door, unbuckles his seatbelt and leaves. He stumbles and trips a little bit on the way out but recovers gracefully enough.

“What the fuck— _what the fuck?!”_ Richie is shouting after him, completely beside himself and voice straining in the wind. “You crazy fucking— _get back in the car!”_

“No,” Eddie pouts, crossing his arms and starting to walk. His plan is to walk all the way back to the town house. They’re sort of in the middle of nowhere on some road out in the boonies that wraps around the Barrens. There’s a gas station and a Mom and Pop restaurant in sight while the town is still about a mile or two down the road, but, hey, whatever. It’s good exercise.

“Eddie, get back in the _goddamn_ car!” Richie says, borderline hysterical with rage now as he’s had to slow down to a comical snail’s pace to match Eddie’s walking speed. A few cars that pull up behind him get quickly irritated, honking and shouting obscenities as they pass him.

“What’s the fuckin’ point? You’re not listening to me, anyway,” Eddie spits back, indignant.

“Don’t be a bitch. Get back in the car. You’re holding up traffic.”

 _“You’re_ holding up traffic. I’m just out for a walk.”

 _“Yeah?”_ Richie yells. “Well, I have a right to be angry! I told you some heavy shit and you threw it right back in my face like an asshole!”

“Blow me.” Eddie gives him the finger.

“Oh, _real_ mature—”

Another car passes Richie, some man yelling out what sounds like a string of impassioned Spanish curse words.

“I’ll leave you on the side of the road, asshole!” Richie shouts at him. “Don’t think I won’t!”

“Good! I wish you would!”

“Fine!”

Predictably, Richie doesn’t speed up at all. After another long moment, he groans defeat.

“Eddie, get in the fucking car!”

“Are you gonna calm the fuck down and hear what I have to say?”

“No! But I’m gonna drive you back to the town house so you don’t get mugged and shanked on the side of the road, how’s that sound?”

“I’d rather be mugged and shanked.”

Richie’s face pinches in deep-set annoyance. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that? God, you’re irritating—”

“And you’re an insensitive prick. And if you stopped talking out your ass for five seconds and just _listened_ to me, you’d know that I fucking _love you_ , but you won’t let me explain—”

Richie stops the car.

Eddie’s just a little shocked by it—so even though he _was_ just gonna keep walking, he totally was—he has to stop and do a little confused double-take.

Richie’s face has lost its passion. It’s now just very deadpan.

“Fine. Get in the car.”

“You’re gonna let me talk?”

“Sure. Yeah, whatever. Just get back in the car.”

“As in you’re not gonna speak? You’re gonna shut the fuck up and let me speak?”

“Eddie,” Richie speaks through gritted teeth, clearly on the fringes of patience. “Yes. Get in the car.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Eddie, I swear to God, I’m taking a vow of silence. If I break it before you’re done talking, I will _give_ you the fucking car for free, alright? You can drive it all the way back to your wife in New York and tell her you won it off a dipshit comedian who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

Eddie considers this momentarily. He shrugs. “I wouldn’t want it anyway,” he tells Richie as he opens the door and gets back in the car. “It looks like every car on every poster that’s up on a sixteen-year-old boy’s bedroom wall, right next to Pamela Anderson’s tits.”

“Fuck you; they were Cindy Crawford’s,” Richie says as he puts the car back in gear and starts driving again, without any real anger anymore. “Why’d you say that?” he says, as an afterthought.

Eddie’s briefly confused. “What?”

“You know what. The _‘I love you’_ shit. Why’d you fucking say that, man?”

Eddie blinks. Once, then again.

“Look, Richie, I don’t know what you think of me, but I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t do that to you. Make fun of you, like…like that. I wouldn’t—”

“It’s not what I think of you. I don’t know jack-shit about you, except that I’ve been in love with you for twenty-seven years and just remembered that yesterday, alright? And that every time you look at me like that I can’t fucking breathe or think straight, alright, so just knock—knock it off—actually, could you like, put a bag, or something, over your head, ‘cause your eyes are too…big.” Richie gestures vaguely to Eddie’s whole face as he visibly struggles to stop looking at it and focus on the road.

“My eyes are…big?”

“Yeah, they’re large,” Richie nods with vigor and conviction. “Abnormally, freakishly large. You know that Tim Burton movie, _Big Eyes?_ Yeah, they based that on you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Eddie asks, lost. In the exhausted way he gets after Richie starts talking too much.

“Well, they’re distracting, Eddie, and they’re… _fuck._ Never mind. I said I was gonna shut up; let you talk.”

Eddie nods. _Right._ He swallows and turns in his seat, facing the front windshield. He goes back to absently twiddling his thumbs; staring intently at his lap.

“I think I’m gonna leave my wife.”

Richie’s eyes go wide and he blinks at Eddie. Then, the wall of separation that Eddie hates so much comes crashing back down, and Richie’s eyes just as quickly narrow, and he looks back at the road.

“Yeah, okay.”

“You said you weren’t—”

“All I said was _‘yeah, okay’._ ”

“What?”

“No, keep talking. You said you wanted to talk, keep—”

“No, what?” Eddie presses.

Richie shakes his head. “I’m not your _gay awakening,_ alright. That’s not what this is. You wanna have a midlife crisis? Go find some other sad, gay sap to make you question your whole existence, divorce your wife and get a ‘live, laugh, love’ tattoo over. I’m in love with you. That means something to me.”

“You’re a fucking idiot.”

“Yeah?” Richie bites. “Well, fine.”

“And you’re fucking scared. Of everything. You know, when someone tells you they love you back, this is so _fucking far_ from the response they usually expect to get—”

“You don’t love me back. We just nearly died together, and I made the mistake of following that up by dropping a bomb on you, and now you’re caught up in all these fucking weird, confusing feelings of nostalgia that you just remembered you have, and wondering if you like cock. And maybe you do—hey, whatever, you know, who’s to say—but it’s not ‘cause of me.”

“My shrink’s back home in New York, thanks. I pay for that.”

“Jesus Christ, really?” Richie hardly stifles his laugh. “Find a new one.”

Eddie’s body goes cold and his spine goes straight. Richie’s hair blows unfairly in the wind, showing off the dull gleam in his blue eyes, the lines of his wide neck, and his Adam’s apple, and the broadness of his jaw. Eddie hates it. It’s suddenly the least attractive thing he’s ever seen.

“You know what,” Eddie speaks with measure. “Drop me off at the town house, and just…forget everything I said here, alright? Forget that I kissed you. You’re right. I didn’t mean it.”

Richie’s jaw goes tight and he squeezes his eyes shut again, briefly. When Eddie hears his voice next, it sounds wrecked. And terribly, horribly soft again. Eddie tries to ignore it.

“Okay, fine, but listen, Eds, I’m sorry, alright, I’m a fucking asshole, I didn’t—”

“Forget it. And I’ll forget what you said. And we’ll pretend this whole car ride never happened, and we’ll both be better off for it.”

Richie swallows and Eddie can hear it.

“Yeah. Okay,” he says, real quiet.

**i’m doing good, i’m on some new shit**

Eddie pads on bare feet across the hardwood floors of his L.A. studio apartment, phone nestled in the space between his ear and his shoulder.

 _“Well, I think they’re really good,”_ Bev says on the other end, the sound of her chewing an apple in his ear not the _most_ pleasant thing to hear at ten in the morning after he’s just woken up and had his coffee.

Eddie holds the canvas outstretched in his hands, staring at it from a sideways angle to see if he finds it any less offensive that way. Not really.

“You think? ‘Cause I’m looking at number four and I’m really not happy with—”

_“No, no, no, they’re good, they’re gonna sell, I promise. Trust me, I went to art school. Or, at least I think I did. I’m definitely still paying for it and I’ve got a diploma with my name on it. The rest is really kind of a blur. Y’know. I drank a lot. Smoked a lot of pot.”_

Eddie winces. “…You sure?”

 _“Yes, I’m sure.”_ She pauses. _“You know, you’re really talented, Eddie, and I’m not just saying that because you’re my friend, or I feel bad for you, or something weird like that.”_

“When you invited me to be a part of the benefit, you know, it did cross my mind that you were just being nice. You know, after Myra—”

 _“Oh God, no. I wouldn’t do that.”_ She swallows her apple. _“I mean, I would—you know, fuck that bitch, don’t get me wrong, it’d be worth it just to give you the opportunity to prove to her you can do something with your life that actually makes you happy for once—but also, I needed artists that I thought were gonna sell. If I was just doing it to be nice, I’d, like, I don’t know, invite you to some Thursday afternoon show where we auction off stuff that looks like my neighbor’s kids made it at Color Me Mine.”_

Eddie snorts.

_“This stuff is good. I’m really proud of you.”_

“I think some of it’s too abstract.”

_“It’s avant-garde. Besides, these are SoHo pricks we’re selling to. You could sell them a shit stain and tell them it’s evocative of the 2008 housing crisis. They’d eat it up.”_

“Gross.”

_“Not that I’m comparing your work to…a-a…shit stain. You—you know what I mean. Your stuff is real. There’s real emotion behind it.”_

“You’re just saying most of them can’t tell the difference.”

_“Just some. Plenty of buyers know good work when they see it.”_

Eddie gnaws on his bottom lip, peeling skin off in one spot with his teeth, layer by layer.

“Hey, Bev, can I, um—can I show you something, actually?”

_“Oooh, is it another piece? I’m excited!”_

“Well—yeah—I mean, no. It’s not…I don’t know if I should…um. I just wanted to get your opinion on…well. You’ll…you’ll get it.”

_“Okay, I’ll switch to video call.”_

“Yeah.”

He thinks he’s gonna vomit. Bev’s bright, cheery face shows up on his phone pretty quickly though, so he doesn’t have time.

He breathes in deep through his nose, and exhales. He flips the view.

 _“…Oh,”_ Bev breathes. Then, _“Oh,”_ again, with new understanding.

“Yeah. So…”

_“Oh. Eddie, I…I don’t…”_

“I’m thinking…I’m thinking maybe I don’t submit this one.”

 _“No, Eddie, it’s…”_ she sighs. _“It’s the best one.”_

“Yeah, I know it is.”

_“I mean, God, it’s…it’s gorgeous. Eddie, really, it’s…wow. Holy shit.”_

“But…?”

_“It’s up to you.”_

He sighs, running his free hand through his hair.

 _“I’ve tried asking him, you know. If he’s coming. He won’t give me a straight answer. He just changes the subject, like he didn’t even hear me. I’ll keep asking,”_ Bev tells him. She adds: _“I’m sorry.”_

“Don’t be,” Eddie says. “I don’t even really want him there.”

 _“Yes, you do,”_ she says softly; knowing.

“I really don’t.”

_“Eddie, I’m looking at a watercolor painting of his face on a canvas bigger than my kitchen counter.”_

“…Shit.”

_“…Which I know is painted from memory because the two of you haven’t spoken in a year.”_

“It’s stupid. I shouldn’t have painted it. It’s creepy, and it makes me look like I’m wallowing in fucking self-pity. Which I’m not. At all.”

_“I know that.”_

“And on the off-chance that he does come, and he sees it, he’s gonna get the wrong idea, and—”

 _“Can I ask…I mean, what_ is _the right idea, exactly?”_

“I—it—well, that—uh—”

_“Eddie, you can say that you still have feelings for him. I mean, that’s okay, no one’s gonna judge you—”_

“I have a boyfriend. Kind of.”

_“Is he coming to the show?”_

“Uh—we-maybe, I don’t…yeah, I mean—it’s not—”

_“You haven’t told him about it yet, have you.”_

“No. But come on, that’s not a crime. It’s not that serious. It’s not like we’re living together.”

_“Eddie.”_

“…Yeah?”

_“You haven’t told him about it because you didn’t know if you were gonna enter that painting.”_

“…That’s…that’s neither here nor there. It hasn’t come up.”

_“The thing that’s consumed your work for the past six months ‘hasn’t come up’?”_

“Shut up, Bev.”

_“Okay, but, you know, it’s fine that you—"_

“Fine. I will, okay? I’ll judge me. This is pathetic. This is fucking sad. Whenever he comes over, I have to hide this fucking thing under my bed. Like porn. I don’t even _think_ that way about him anymore, I…it’s not…I don’t know why I painted this.”

_“What’s so bad about it, anyway, I mean, you and Richie—you’re both adults—fuck, I mean, neither of you will tell me what went down between you so it’s hard to give advice, but, like, two things can be true, you know, you can have these weird, lingering feelings while still acknowledging that it just didn’t work out—”_

“There was nothing to work out. We were never together. We’re just…not the same people we remembered as kids, you know? It was confusing, and a mess, and happened under really weird, clown amnesia-related circumstances, and it fucked us up.” Eddie pauses. “Fucked me up, anyway. Maybe he’s fine. Moving on. Dealing with it. You know.”

_“He’s not fine.”_

“He sounds—”

 _“Eddie, to put this in perspective,_ you’re _what I would call, ‘dealing with it’. You moved on from a shitty marriage, upended your life by leaving a career that made you miserable, moved across the country to be with a support system of people who care about you,”_ she tells him with assertion. _“Last Saturday night, Richie came pounding on our front door, wasted out of his fucking mind, and proceeded to pass out on our couch after watching eighteen straight episodes of Law & Order: SVU while mumbling incoherently about how he met Ice-T at a party once. Then he asked me if I thought God was dead and if we’re all alone in the universe, and if love is intangible then how do we know it’s real.”_

“I mean, it’s Richie, that sounds about par-for-the-course.”

_“He’s forty. He has a career, and a house in the Hills. He’s richer than God.”_

“I thought things were…good. I don’t know. With the Netflix specials, and, the…y’know, the coming out, and—”

 _“Yeah, and that’s what he wants people to think, too, but it’s bullshit, and I’m the only person—well, me and Ben, I guess—that sees that. Alright, the drinking’s bad, the sex is…either nonexistent or happening with people who don’t stick around long enough for me to meet them anyway, and he really,_ really _fucking likes pretending like he doesn’t know who you are. It’s fucking annoying. Super childish and not even funny. Like I said your name to Ben in passing last week and it was all, ‘Eddie? Eddie who? Vedder? Murphy? Van Halen?’ and I was all, ‘No, Kaspbrak,’ and he was all like, ‘Kaspbrak…Kaspbrak…Do we know an Eddie Kaspbrak? I don’t think we do,’ and Ben was all, ‘Jesus, give it a rest, Richie,’ but he wouldn’t quit acting like he didn’t know who we meant. I think he might’ve been a little drunk then, too.”_

“Yeah. I, uh, maybe…didn’t need to know all that, Bev.”

_“Right. Sorry. Just…ugh, he’s so frustrating. I’ve been trying, you know, my best, to get through to him, but it’s…it’s like a full-time job. Like, I don’t even know if Ben and I have the time in our lives to have kids if we wanted to, but we definitely don’t if I’ve got a forty-year-old man-child hanging around who refuses to go to therapy.”_

“I just don’t know that I’m the one to…talk to him, Bev, I—I’m sorry, I don’t know if I can do that—”

_“Oh! Oh, God, no, I’m not asking you to. Sorry, if that’s how that came across. No, I know. I know that wound needs…time. You’re in a good place right now, I get that, and he…wouldn’t help. I probably shouldn’t even be telling you all this. He’s not your responsibility, anyway. He’s not mine, either. I just…I wish he’d take care of himself, you know? I wish he’d grow up.”_

“Yeah,” he says. A final, resounding thought on the whole thing.

_“The painting’s really good, Eddie.”_

“Thanks.”

 _“It’s up to you,”_ she says again.

They hang up.

He stuffs the painting in his closet.

**i thought i saw you at the bus stop, i didn’t though**

“No, it’s great, Eddie, I just—I don’t understand how you didn’t say anything before.”

“Well, I’m saying something now.”

“That doesn’t—that doesn’t answer the question though, I—”

“Look, it’s something I want to share with you, and I…I’d really like it if you’d come. You don’t—you don’t have to buy anything, or anything, just…the support would mean a lot, and—”

“W—of course! No, of course I’ll come. I just feel like…can we talk about this, though? Wh-what’s going on? There’s like, this whole other side of you that I feel like I’m only just now learning about.”

“What, that I paint as, like, a hobby?” Eddie snorts. “I haven’t been doing it that long. You’re acting like you just found out I have a couple bodies under the floorboards.”

“Do you? I feel like I wouldn’t know even if you did because we don’t _talk about—”_

“Hi, what can I get for you?” Their waitress pops up next to their table. Eddie hands her back his menu.

“Yeah, I’ll get a flat white, and an egg white omelet—no onion. Thanks.”

Darren doesn’t stop looking at Eddie to look at her.

“Just coffee, black.”

She leaves.

“Besides, you know I’m going back to school for art therapy,” Eddie tells him as he cleans his hands off with a wet wipe.

“How long have you been working on this show?”

Eddie blows air out of his mouth, in a performative way of pretending like he’s thinking real hard about it.

“God, I don’t…couple of months, maybe—”

“Like how many? How many months?”

“Like five…six…”

 _“Six_ months? _Six—_ "

Eddie has to stop himself from rolling his eyes, honestly. They hadn’t even been dating for six months. They met two months ago at one of Bill’s _“I’m divorced and can now throw all the house parties I want”_ parties.

Darren acted like they’d been married for three years and Eddie had been hiding a kid out of wedlock. It was clingy, and overbearing, and it annoyed him.

But the sex was good. So, he couldn’t _say_ that.

“Look I’m sorry, alright?” Eddie says, mostly to end it. “I didn’t do it intentionally.”

Then he sees something past Darren’s shoulder that turns his throat dry.

Darren starts out with something like, _“Yeah, that’s my point—”_ or something that generally signals to Eddie that they’ll never fucking be done with this conversation until they’re dead—but he’s not really hearing it because there’s broad shoulders and a Hawaiian shirt and scruffy brown hair with his back to him across the café, standing at the counter.

The man turns around to leave.

It turns out to be not even close. Nose is too long. Waist is too skinny. No glasses. Eddie doesn’t know if he’s relieved or disappointed.

“Are you—hey, are you listening to me?”

“Sorry,” Eddie freely admits.

Darren looks back at him blankly, mouth hanging open a little.

“Are we in a relationship?” he asks. “What are we doing?”

“N-no, of course we are. We—”

“Really? ‘Cause it feels like you’re just a loose acquaintance that I have sex with three days out of the week.”

Eddie’s jaw sets a little. “I’m sorry, if I’ve been…distracted, I just—”

“No, no. I get it. You’ve been spending all your waking hours working on this art show that I only found out about fifteen minutes ago. I’ll tell you what,” Darren moves to get up out of his seat and grabs his jacket off the back of the chair. “You spend the next week thinking about what it is you want us to be—you know, whenever you’re not too busy, that is—and you can let me know at the benefit. ‘Kay?” He throws a couple of dollars down on the table for his coffee.

“Hey, c’mon, why don’t you sit down, alright—”

“No. I’m gonna go. Leave you to your thoughts. ‘Cause I want to give you all the time you need to really,” he breathes, _“really_ think about this.”

Darren shrugs his jacket on. He pats him on the shoulder as he leaves. “Have a good one, Eddie.”

**i hit the ground running each night**

Bev’s done up in makeup and a little black cocktail dress, and her perfume smells _amazing_ , and if he liked women, he’d be drooling. He tells her this and she laughs, loud and pretty with white teeth.

“You don’t clean up so bad yourself, handsome.” She snaps the elastic of one of his suspenders with a long, expertly manicured fingernail. “I’m gonna have buyers asking what _you’re_ goin’ for.”

Eddie isn’t usually affected by shit like that—something about a whole childhood of his mom and older, female relatives pinching his cheeks ‘til they were red and raw and going on about how _handsome_ he was—but Bev’s praise brings a bit of fond heat to his cheeks.

It came with the divorce. Dressing less like the nerdy kid who got his lunch money stolen and more like a man with the ability to look _good_ in a fitted suit. He’d always had the body for it—as he’s come to realize. But the effort he’d put into his body before had never been about how physically attractive it was. It had been about a borderline-unhealthy obsession with his health that he’s since been trying to shirk. Bev had informed him that it was time he actually _enjoy_ the fruit of his efforts, and had helped him a bit in revamping his closet. And so here he was. Enjoying it.

Ben approaches from the kitchens, looking winded and holding a wine bottle in one hand and a tray of hors d’oeuvres in the other.

“We’re running out of champagne. I found merlot in the meantime.”

“How are we almost out of champagne, I asked for six bottles— _ooh,_ bacon-wrapped dates!” Bev is easily and delightfully distracted with stuffing her mouth with one and topping her plate off with two more.

The show had just opened within the last half-hour or so—there was a decent-sized crowd gathered and milling about the small gallery Bev and Ben had rented out. Eddie had admitted to them with some level of embarrassment that he’d never actually _been_ to an art show before, so the whole thing was wonderfully new and exciting to him.

He sees Bev’s eyes flash a little over the rim of her wine glass at the same instant he feels a hand on the small of his back, and lips pressing on his cheek.

“Hey there—” Eddie squeals out in surprise, about an octave high. He doesn’t know why, but there was a part of him expecting (hoping?) that Darren wouldn’t come.

“Hi, you.” He says warm and low in Eddie’s ear before he turns to Bev and Ben; shakes Ben’s hand, then Bev’s. “Hey, how’s it going?”

“Darren, right?” Bev has her wide, polite eyes on, but she squints a little bit in embarrassment. Eddie doesn’t blame her. Darren’s got one of those pleasant, lovely, exhaustingly generic faces. “I’m so sorry, I know we’ve met—"

“Yeah, yeah it is—”

“Sorry, we’ve met a lot of people today, the names—”

They share in some painfully polite (fake) laughter, which peters out comfortably. Eddie still feels a little like dying.

“Well, hey, I’ve got an idea,” Darren starts, and Eddie’s dying to know what it is. “How about you show me your pieces? Give me the tour. You know.”

Eddie’s thinking that maybe he can come up with some excuse, but Bev speaks faster.

“Yeah, go, go, go!” she says, obliviously urging Eddie along. “And while you do that, I’m gonna go hunt down that champagne—like, what the hell happened? Are these people all really that drunk right now, Jesus that went so fast—”

Darren walks with him across the room, and all Eddie can feel is the searing heat of his hand on the small of his back. He hates it. He’s decided. It’s too possessive; too familiar. It only feels nice in the vaguely horny way that it feels nice to have another person’s body touching his and to know that it’s probably promising sex later, if he plays his cards right. But that’s about it. The gesture has him more irritated, than anything. The irritation drowns out the horny.

He’s brought him over to Eddie’s pieces and Darren’s eyes go a little wide before Eddie stops him in a low voice:

“You…came,” Eddie says carefully. Darren seems confused.

“W-yeah. I said I would.”

Eddie makes some noise in the back of his throat.

Darren steps in front of him then, a quizzical look on his face.

“Did you…not want me to come?”

“Excuse me?” Eddie’s getting tapped on the shoulder by some woman with a glass of Bev’s missing champagne in her hand. “You’re the artist, right?”

Eddie nods in the affirmative.

“Do you have time to answer some questions? I’m curious…” and she’s trailing off and leading him over to a piece on the opposite wall, so Eddie, delighted for the excuse to leave, spares Darren a somewhat sympathetic shrug to the tune of, _‘hey, what can you do?’_. Darren looks more sad, than anything.

Which is…good, Eddie thinks, as he listens to the woman’s comments and questions. You know, he can handle a break-up (break-up? Is that what it is? Really? For just two months of dating, can they call it a break-up?) that’s borne of emotional exhaustion and a need to just be _done._ As opposed to something nastier and derived from anger. That could get messy. And Eddie didn’t need messy.

The woman’s questions don’t last forever, though. And even though a small crowd has now gathered around Eddie’s work, Darren seems to think it’s the appropriate time to grab Eddie by the arm and pull him aside.

“Hey, I really gotta get back to—” Eddie is trying, but he gets a sense that trying to weasel his way out isn’t gonna work this time.

“I need you to give me some reassurance here,” Darren’s saying, kinda desperate. “That I did the right thing by coming here today.”

Eddie blinks.

Then he blinks again.

“Well…yeah. Of course. Like you said, I mean, you told me you were going to. I—”

“Did you think about what we talked about on Monday?”

Eddie stares at him. “Um,” he starts, dumbly. “Yeah.”

“Did you? Really?” There’s extreme doubt in Darren’s expression.

Eddie tries to wrestle his arm back, to little success. “Look, yes, I did, but could we—”

_“Hey, I got a question.”_

At the voice, Eddie’s head snaps to his right, jaw tense and eyes wide as saucers.

Richie stands at the back of the small crowd, leaning with one shoulder nonchalantly pressed against a wall that Eddie is pretty sure there’s rope around for a reason, and since he can’t read a fucking room and didn’t bother to lower his voice, people are starting to stare.

“Yeah, hey, I got a question for the artist.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything, just lets his jaw click back into place and his eyes narrow. In his periphery, he sees Darren following his line of sight with questioning glances.

“Wouldn’t you say these pieces are all a bit derivative of other pieces which also feature some dude putting paint on a brush and transferring it onto a piece of canvas stretched across a wooden frame to make a picture that loosely resembles something?”

There’s some confused murmuring in the room, and also some sounds of recognition of Richie, and Eddie’s blood is fucking _boiling._

“Nah, I’m pulling your leg. These are great. Really, people, open up your wallets, ‘cause this shit’s something special, alright? My question was actually gonna be if you know where the bathrooms are, ‘cause all that champagne’s got me _reeling_ to take a piss.”

There’s some stifled laughter across the crowd.

“Isn’t that Richie Tozier?” Darren asks, looking Richie up and down skeptically. Then, to Eddie: “Do you know Richie Tozier?”

“No,” Eddie says definitively, before storming over to him.

Richie’s saying something to some woman next to him that has her laughing when Eddie stomps up in front of him, seething. When Richie’s eyes land on him they widen right along with that stupid fucking grin on his face.

“Hey, you! So, this is neat. This is a neat little set-up you got here. Totally not pretentious. Like, at all.”

Eddie stares down his nose and his teeth grind together so hard he thinks he probably creates three different cavities right then and there.

 _“What_ are you doing here? Are you drunk?”

“Wh—me?” Richie gestures to himself with a bit of feigned surprise. “No! I just came to see the show. Support the local arts.” Richie glances a bit unfavorably at a sculpture on his left by another artist that, admittedly, just looks like a lump of clay. “You know. That shit.”

“I talk to Bev all the time. I know you don’t come to these things. Ever.”

Richie’s mouth forms a thin line as he folds his big arms over themselves. “So, what? So, what do you want me to say? That I came to see you? That what you want to hear?”

“Did you?”

“Well, duh. What—is that a fucking crime now?”

“It is if you came here just to be a dick and perform your stand-up routine in front of my prospective buyers.”

“Oh no, that wasn’t stand up—I genuinely need to know where the bathrooms are. I had a glass of that wine, yeah, but I also grabbed a big gulp in the car on the way here and I’m, like, about to blow, dude.” Richie crosses his hands over his groin and starts hopping from one foot to the next, like the fucking toddler he is.

“Turn around, make a left, it’s down the hall on the right.”

 _“Ohgodthankyousomuch—“_ and Richie’s zooming in the opposite direction.

Eddie’s left to bring one of the two hands resting on his hips to his forehead, trying to rub away the headache.

Bev is rushing over soon, her heels clacking against the hardwood floors as she wears her look of apology plainly.

“I am so, so, so, _so very—”_

Eddie holds up a hand to stop her. “It’s fine.”

“He didn’t tell me. I swear he didn’t. I’m as shocked as you are.”

“Yeah, well, let’s just hope he’s actually sober, I guess.”

Bev’s eyes flash. “Why? Did he smell like booze?”

“No, and he says he’s clean, but if he pulls one more stunt like that, I’m gonna lose my shit. This isn’t a comedy club.”

“I’ll…keep him distracted. Put some food in his mouth. That’ll shut him up.”

She does, for the most part. Bev ends up keeping Richie pretty much towards the back of the gallery, engrossed in conversation with Ben. But that doesn’t mean Eddie doesn’t see all the times his eyes wander, openly and shamelessly, to where Eddie is mingling, shaking hands and talking to buyers.

Admittedly, Eddie wouldn’t have been able to see that if he hadn’t, you know, been looking, too. But…that’s beside the fucking point.

The later into the night that it gets, and the more it becomes apparent that Richie’s not leaving any time soon, the more weirded out Eddie gets by the whole thing. He’d figured—with, frankly, adequate supporting evidence—that Richie’s appearance was going to be some act of petty sabotage.

But that didn’t seem to be it at all.

When Richie starts roaming around the space by himself, drink in hand, and looking…oddly sort of calm and somber, Eddie watches him, brow drawn and tight. He thinks.

He looks in his immediate area—makes sure no one’s waiting to talk to him—then he makes his move across the room. Richie is stopped at some abstract cubist piece with lots of colors. Eddie sidles up next to him at a (safe) distance, hands folded behind his back. Richie doesn’t really turn to acknowledge him, but he takes a swig of his wine.

“Do you even like art?” Eddie asks. There’s no real judgment in his tone, or so he hopes. He’s trying to be, you know, civil.

“Sure,” Richie says, gesturing to the piece in front of them. “I love shapes. Colors. Y’know. Who doesn’t?” He coughs, or clears his throat.

“You have no idea what you’re doing here, do you?”

“Hell, no. I do feel kinda fuckin’ bad that Bevvie does these all the time and I’ve never even been to one. It’s not so bad. It’s going to a good cause. And. Y’know. Free booze.” He raises his glass.

“Yeah. About that,” Eddie starts. “Bev tells me you’re a mess.”

“Aw, she didn’t have to say all that. That’s so sweet.”

“She worries about you.”

“’Course she does. She’s like that. You know how she gets.”

“Should _I_ be worried about you?”

Eddie turns and looks at his profile for the first time since the conversation started. Richie’s jaw goes taught. He takes another drink.

“Don’t see why you would.”

Eddie looks away, pissed now. His jaw sets, too.

“Right.”

There’s a dip into silence, during which Eddie has half a mind to just walk away.

“Bevvie says you’ve been working your ass off on this,” Richie says, and his voice sounds…different now. Different like it sounded that day when he drove Eddie to the kissing bridge. Lower. Soft.

Eddie blinks, and casts that fucking memory back into the sea, where it belongs.

“…That true?” Richie asks.

“More or less.”

In his periphery Richie looks up at him.

“’S it make you happy?”

Eddie hesitantly tears his gaze away from the painting in front of him to side-eye Richie. Questioningly.

“I…yeah. Yeah, it does.”

Richie nods. “Good. That’s good. I’m, uh…glad.” Then, surer, deeper, in a tone that penetrates: "I'm glad it makes you happy."

Eddie swallows, a familiar lump in his throat growing thicker.

“Right, well I’m gonna get ba—” He makes it one step.

“Divorce go alright?”

Eddie pauses; turns back, face a little slack with surprise.

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Sure, Richie. It was the time of my fuckin’ life.”

“I meant,” Richie starts to clarify. “She didn’t give you any grief, did she? I…never heard. Y’know. Just that it happened, and that you were—”

“Of course she gave me grief,” Eddie answers. “But it’s over now, so who cares.”

Richie looks like he takes that in for a moment; looks like he’s thinking.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a beat. “Sorry that I wasn’t, you know, there for you to—”

Eddie’s face is in the middle of morphing into something that’s somewhere between wildly confused and wildly angry, when he feels a tap on his shoulder.

“Hey, Eddie,” Bev says in his ear, “I’ve got a lady looking to ask you some questions about a piece, so—”

“Sure. Sure. Yeah, I’m coming.”

He turns and leaves before he can really get a sense of what the fuck Richie’s on about.

Because where the fuck does he get off, anyway? Coming here and…and to what? To relive the same shit over and over again? What’s the fucking point? He won’t accept Eddie worrying about him or caring about him but he’ll stand there and—

It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter and it was distracting from what’s important right now, which is getting this stuff to sell.

It’s the last half-hour of the show. He finishes wrapping up talking to one of the last gallery patrons and Bev’s nearby, so he reaches out to tap her arm.

“Hey, did you see, uh, where Darren went? I haven’t seen him around, I—”

Bev blinks. “Oh,” she starts. “Oh, sweetie, I…saw him go out to his car maybe forty minutes ago. I thought…I really thought he told you, I’m—”

He exhales sharp through his nose. “Right. No, right. Yeah. Great. That’s…fine.”

It’s then that he notices she’s removing rope, and has started to pull some of his art down off the walls.

“Wait, w—what’s going on?”

Bev freezes, and swallows.

“Um,” she starts, and Eddie hears the uncertainty in her voice; just doesn’t question it, for whatever reason. “Well, show’s nearly over, we’ve got like ten minutes left, so I’m just gonna start packing up the pieces we sold—”

“I didn’t know I had buyers for those.”

“Uh,” she starts again. “No, you…you sold all of them.”

“I—no, I’m pretty sure I only—"

Bev sets the canvas delicately down on the floor and turns to face him, composing herself.

“Eddie,” she starts again. “I just got written a check. For the whole set.”

“No, shit,” he breathes. “Really? That’s—”

His brain makes sense of it in about five seconds.

“No. No he didn’t.”

“Eddie, listen, it’s a _lot_ of money—”

But he’s already turned around and storming through the gallery, scanning for Richie. When he doesn’t see him, he’s sprinting out the front doors and onto the sidewalk.

Richie is getting into his car, parked on the other side of the street.

“Hey!” he’s shouting, strained across the street and atop the sounds of the city. _“Hey!”_

Richie looks up as Eddie’s run across the road, checking only briefly for cars. He smiles.

“Hey yourself, I was just pulling the car around so Ben could load your stuff into the—”

“You _piece of shit!”_ Eddie shoves him—admittedly not with much force, but hard enough to get the point across. “You _fucking piece of shit!”_

Richie holds his arms up in surrender. “Hey! Whoa—whoa! Hold on, what’s—”

“Why the fuck would you do that? I didn’t need you to—”

“Do what? Buy your fucking art? Isn’t that the fucking point of these things? And don’t tell me you’re one of those artists who’s _‘not in it for the money’_ , alright, spare me, it’s too soon for you to be that fucking full of it—”

“I don’t want _your_ money, you fucking asshole!”

 _“My_ money? What the fuck is wrong with _my_ money?!”

“Did it ever occur to you that I did this for recognition? That I wanted to feel validated; that my art was fucking worth something? And you took a shit all over that when you—”

“Hey, I like your art! I didn’t just buy it to be fucking nice! It’s good. I meant that shit, alright—”

“I had buyers! I don’t need your _fucking charity—"_

“It wasn’t charity! What—you’re not even listening to me now, I told you—”

“Why the _fuck_ did you _come here?!”_ Eddie screams at him, throat hoarse. “Why did you come here in the _first_ fucking place? I don’t get it!”

 _“I don’t know!”_ Richie yells it in his face.

Eddie breathes. His chest heaves. There’s a moment of quiet.

“I don’t know, alright?! I don’t. I just… _do_ shit sometimes. It doesn’t make sense to me, but I do it anyway! Fuck, I don’t—I don’t know.” Richie runs a hand through his hair. “I wanted to see you.”

“Well, you saw me. Now, I don’t know what this was—if it was just a stupid cry for attention, or some shit, but it’s done. It’s over. I’ll have Bev give you your money back, and you can—”

“Oh, fuck that. No. I bought them. Fair and square. And if you think you’re talking Bev into giving me a refund, think again, bud, because you _clearly_ didn’t get a good look at all the zeroes on that puppy.”

“Oh, you’re such a fucking baby.”

 _“Me?_ Me—”

“Yes, you—"

“Look at yourself, you—”

“I’m happy! I’m fucking happy for once; I’m doing something I _really_ love doing, that I’m _actually_ passionate about, and you just came here and fucking shat on it! Do you know how shitty that fucking feels? Do you?”

Richie just looks away shakes his head. Not in answer to the question, but because he’s an asshole who’s not listening to him.

“No, you have no idea what that’s like,” Eddie answers for him, “because you have no _idea_ how long it’s taken me to get to this place in my life, or what that means to me, or why you coming here tonight was so _fucking_ uncool—”

“No, yeah, you’re probably right. I shouldn’t’ve come,” Richie says, evenly. “What the fuck was I thinking, right? Just, y’know, trying to start making amends for shit, and, you know, really, I should’ve known better. Apparently just by me fucking _existing,_ I’m some horrible affront to you.”

“You can’t be that fucking naïve.”

“No, I am. Clearly. Clearly I’m fucking stupid. ‘Cause I don’t get it. What—is it your boyfriend? That guy that was hanging all over you—haven’t seen him in a hot minute, where the fuck did he go off to, huh?”

“He left,” Eddie bites.

“Oh! He left, oh,” Richie makes a big show of nodding his understanding, voice dripping with feigned sympathy. “Was that because of me, too? Is that my fucking fault, too?”

“No. Don’t flatter yourself.”

 _“Flatter_ my—” Richie starts, like he can’t fucking believe what he’s hearing.

“You can’t help but make a fucking spectacle of yourself. You walk into the room and suddenly it’s the Richie Tozier show,” Eddie spits. “Tonight was supposed to be _my_ night. If you really wanted to get in touch with me, you could’ve fucking _called_ me, beforehand, instead of being a fucking _drama queen—”_

“Hey, I represent that remark.”

“—shut the fuck up I’m not finished—and making it—once again— _all_ about you,” Eddie’s gesturing wildly with his hands, he’s so fucking angry. “Do you know what every person in there is gonna think now? That I’m a fraud. That I’m some hack. That I put up a big, professional stunt only to have my famous, rich friend come and drop a fat check on all my art. That’s what you did to me tonight.”

“I—”

“But right—I should forgive you, because you’re incapable of fucking _thinking_ before you act, right? Right? Is that it?”

Richie draws a thin line with his mouth and swallows.

“You know,” he starts, quieter. “I thought it was kind of a grand gesture, actually.”

“Yeah, well,” Eddie gives a dry, angry laugh that physically _hurts._ “I’ll fucking give you that. It was. But actually, Richie, you can’t just buy my forgiveness with money, so.”

Richie goes so still that Eddie almost kind of thinks he’s died of a silent heart attack.

“Your forgiveness.” Richie says it without any tone of voice at all.

“Yeah.”

Richie’s jaw quivers with how tight it is.

“Okay,” with that, Richie ducks into the driver’s seat. “See you around, Eds.”

“You—”

“Tell Ben I’ll pay for shipping that stuff to my house. Wasn’t all gonna fit in the trunk anyway.”

The tires screech over whatever Eddie was gonna say next, and Richie drives away into the night.

**you know the greatest films of all time were never made**

The thing with Darren doesn’t exactly faze him. In fact—and he should probably feel some level of shame about it—he kind of forgets that it even happened. There’s no follow-up text or phone call. So he assumes it’s just over, and over in a way that there’s nothing really even to say about it. Which was kind of—for about a week now, in Eddie’s mind—the best possible case scenario.

But there’s a bit of a dark period in the week following the art show, and Eddie’s not even going to attempt to deny it.

He spends a lot of time in sweats on his couch, watching football while passively horny. The two—football and horniness—are not necessarily related, for clarification’s sake. Just circumstantial.

Because (and yeah, in hindsight, he probably should have thought this through before self-sabotaging a perfectly _okay-bordering-on-boring_ relationship) that’s the one shitty part about the Darren thing. Is that normally, on a Friday night, he’d be getting his dick sucked right about now.

He—no shocker here—hadn’t been used to the whole regular, enjoyable sex thing while he’d been with Myra. For a couple obvious reasons. So, naturally, since the divorce, he’s turned into a fucking sex addict.

Or, maybe not. Maybe this is just a normal amount of thinking about sex. He’s not too sure, since he hasn’t talked to his therapist about it. It’s a little embarrassing.

But he thinks about it… _all. the. time._

Except now it’s just him and his right hand, which is not ideal but, eh, fine. It makes him feel like a sad sack of shit just about as much as it makes him feel good—to just sit on the couch and not even really jerk off, just rub his dick passively, doing whatever feels good. His online classes were on break for the holidays, and it’d been about six months since he’d just taken a fucking week like this—a break—and even sitting around feeling sorry for himself—rubbing one out and eating his feelings—feels like fucking _heaven._

Most of the time he’s not really thinking about anything—being largely brain-dead is also a luxury he’s affording himself this week—but a couple of his thoughts have gone, pretty guilt-free, to Darren. More, though, went, with an actual, considerable amount of guilt, to Richie.

Not even guilt for Richie’s sake, ‘cause, y’know, fuck him, but guilt that the asshole _did_ that shit to him, he let him get away with it, and now his hand’s on his dick and he’s thinking about him _like that_. With 60% of his dirty money already probably sitting in his account (he hasn’t looked yet) and that stupid fucking painting burning a hole in his coat closet.

So, like, that all sucks, but also, maybe Richie’d look really good on his knees.

At night he breaks out the ice cream pint and the huge fucking spoon and _Jerry Maguire._

_“Well, maybe you’re all correct, you know: men are the enemy. But—but, but I still love the enemy.”_

Renée Zellweger’s making some compelling points.

Eddie’s fenagling his spoon into his pint of raspberry chocolate chunk when Tom Cruise walks in through the front door.

_“Hello. Hello? I’m looking for my wife.”_

The room full of divorcées goes quiet and Renée Zellweger looks up in surprise and Tom drops his overnight bag on the floor. Eddie sinks back into the couch and contentedly licks the spoon.

 _“Okay. If this is where it has to happen, then…this is where it has to happen,”_ Tom says. _“I’m not letting you get rid of me. How about that? Tonight, our little project, our company, had a very big night. Very, very big night. But it wasn’t complete. Wasn’t nearly close to being in the same vicinity as complete, because I couldn’t share it with you. I couldn’t hear your voice. Or laugh about it with you. I miss you. I miss my wife.”_

Eddie feels himself frown.

_“I love you. You complete me. And I just—as—"_

_“Shut up. Just shut up,”_ and Renée Zellweger’s crying. _“You had me at ‘hello’.”_

Eddie reaches over and hits the power button on his remote. He stands up to go put the ice cream away, because he’s suddenly not fucking hungry anymore.

He slams the freezer door with a resounding and bitter, _“fucking Tom Cruise,”_ before heading off to go get ready for bed.

**and if you wanted me you really should’ve showed**

“You’re saying I’m overreacting.”

Bill shakes his head while he shoves a piece of a croissant in his mouth.

“No,” he says, “no, I’d n-n-never say that.”

“Then what?”

He and Bill are sitting in a coffee shop the following Monday, after Eddie’s somewhat pulled his shit together and is ready to be perceived by the outside world.

“I’m just saying it’s Richie. You g-get what you get. For b-better or worse.” Bill swallows his food. “And you still got the exposure. Bev told me she thought you had a g-g-good night, despite, y-you know.”

Eddie sighs and folds his arms.

“And, c-c-come on, you’re not looking to quit your day job, here. You w-want to be an art therapist, right? You m-made more money last week than I know you ever expected to make doing this in the first place.”

Eddie scoffs. “Yeah, _blood money.”_

“Oh, y-y-you don’t want it? I’ll take it. I love taking Richie’s money. Th-that’s one of life’s greatest pleasures. Asshole prick’s got too much, I say.”

“It’s over,” Eddie shakes his head. “It’s done. Whatever. I just don’t want to think about it anymore. Bev’s got another show in two months, and I’m hoping I’ll be done working on some stuff by then that I can maybe enter there. If Richie wants to use my pieces for firewood, I don’t even give a shit.”

“Actually, I think I’ll use ‘em as my new doormats.” The voice comes from behind him and Eddie _sinks._ “Y’know. Switch ‘em out every month. They’re like the perfect size.”

Eddie leans forward as Richie circles around their table to stand in between them.

“Did you tell him we were coming here?”

Bill shakes his head vigorously.

“No, not at all, I was just in the neighborhood,” Richie wears a shit-eating grin. (Along with a tapered coat that makes his shoulders look too fucking big. Since when does he fucking own tapered coats, anyway? Richie dresses like a beer-bellied homophobic sixty-year-old uncle vacationing in Maui. Piece of shit.)

“You know what they say about L.A. being a small town,” Richie goes on. “But hey, what a _delightful_ fucking coincidence! Billiam, how was Florida? How is Mike settling into his early retirement home?”

“Uh, great, Richie,” Bill manages, clearly uncomfortable. “He’s swell.”

“And…” Richie turns his head, looking down at Eddie with a smile that is now very, _very_ forced. “…You.”

He says it like a bitch. Like he’s pretending he’s forgotten Eddie’s name. Eddie’s eyes narrow in boiling irritation. (Like he didn’t just spend the better part of the last few days imagining how his dick would look between Richie’s lips).

“You’re here, also,” Richie continues with his wry grimace. “Isn’t that great.”

Eddie doesn’t grace him with a response.

“Well, I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve gotta run,” Richie throws a thumb over his shoulder. “You know how it is.”

Bill throws a hand up in silent goodbye. Eddie doesn’t move.

Richie leaves, with a wink.

After he’s gone, there’s a beat of silence. Then Bill starts chuckling to himself.

“What?” Eddie asks.

“I think he likes you.”

“Oh, fu—” Eddie crumples up his napkin and throws it at Bill’s stupid, smarmy face.

**if you never bleed, you’re never gonna grow**

“How’ve you been doing this week?”

“Better, thanks.” Eddie slides his palms down his pantlegs as he sits down in the armchair across from Rachel. “No side effects since I switched medications, so, that’s all good.”

“That’s good, that’s good,” Rachel nods as she smooths out her skirt underneath her and sits, clipboard in her lap. “I really want to hear about the art show, though, how did that go? I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it, my wife and I really wanted to be there, but we had a family obligation.”

“Oh, no, no, not at all, I completely understand—yeah, thank you, no, it—uh, it went…” he searches for the words. “It went well,” he arrives at. “I think. I’ve never—um, I’ve never done something like that before, so I can only guess, but I think…yeah, I think it went well.”

“You really put yourself out there, you should be so proud of yourself,” she says with a smile, adjusting her glasses. “I’m proud of you; I think it’s great.”

“Thank you. Thanks.”

“It wasn’t too many weeks ago that you…told me you’d suffered from a panic attack, leading up to the benefit. But…you’ve not experienced any residual panic, since then?”

Eddie feels his palms go a little warm, then a little cold.

“Uh,” he starts. “A bit of underlying anxiety, maybe. But no, uh, no panic attacks, no. Just…just the one.”

Rachel nods. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, ‘course,”

“What, in your mind, would have happened if the benefit had not gone well?”

Eddie thinks. “I, uh,” he coughs. “I guess…I don’t know, um, you know, I could take or leave the money. I guess it…it depends. Maybe I would’ve waited for another opportunity; tried it again. Maybe I would’ve stopped. I don’t know.”

“I meant, what would not receiving validation have _meant_ to you?” she clarifies. “In the moment, what would it have meant?”

“It...” he sighs. “It would’ve meant I was wrong. About a lot. About…believing that I could do something on my own. That I could remake myself. That I could be successful at something I actually enjoyed.”

Rachel lets that sit in the air for a moment. Then she starts: “And by extent, wouldn’t that mean that your m—”

“—that my mom was right,” he finishes for her. “Yeah. Yeah, it would.”

She gives her head a little shake.

“But don’t you see the fault in that logic? I mean, you’ve done _so much_ to get yourself to this point. It’s amazing, what you’ve given to yourself. That work, and those efforts aren’t for nothing just because one thing doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would.”

“No, I—I know. My mid-life crisis has just always felt like it’s a test I haven’t passed yet.”

“And when will you pass it?”

Eddie frowns. He shrugs.

“When I can stop feeling sorry for myself, I guess.”

“We all feel sorry for ourselves from time to time.”

“I guess it’s easier to do when you’re lonely.”

She gives him a sad smile. “You’re feeling lonely, Eddie?”

“Sometimes, yeah. Like…not miserably lonely, just…”

He shakes his head; hates himself for what he’s about to say. He blinks away the sheen that’s covered his eyes.

“You know, sometimes I miss my wife.”

Rachel raises her eyebrows a little.

“Yeah. Fuck, it’s—” he laughs, dry. “It’s crazy, I know.”

“I don’t like that word very much."

"Fuck?"

"Crazy."

"Oh."

"But it’s not. Not at all. I was just a bit surprised to hear you say it, that’s all.”

“Not her, really. But living with her. Living with…someone,” he says. “It was the thing I was most excited for, moving to L.A.. Having my own space for the first time in my life. And I do, I—I love it. _God,_ I love it. Which is why I can’t stand that I…that I miss her, sometimes. Crawling into bed next to her. Drinking my morning coffee with her. Buying groceries with her. Stupid stuff.”

“You miss intimacy.”

“I…yes.”

“I know it’s not the same, but you’ve spoken fondly of a familiar intimacy with your friends, from childhood. Beverly. Bill. Richie.”

Eddie flinches.

“I know you moved to L.A. to be with them. Has anything changed?”

“Sure. Sure it did. Of course. Not really better or worse, just…”

“What?”

“We grew up.”

**but we were something, don’t you think so?**

_“I think Bill’s new girl is very cute,” Beverly says leaning forward over the diner table while she swirls the straw in her milkshake. “Congratulations, Bill.”_

_Bill sitting next to him gives a shy smile, a blush and a nod. Eddie observes the situation with mild interest. They all knew something had gone on between Bev and Bill that summer, but Bev was moving away in a month and they might not ever see her again, so they’d decided to call it amicable quits. Bill moved on easily enough. He had a new crush on some girl who lived down the street in about a week._

_He still had a candle lit for Bev, though._

_“Yeah, good on you, Bill,” Mike says, between bites of burger._

_“She’s alright,” quips Richie, “if you like pigtails and chipped teeth.”_

_“Can it, Rich,” Bev says, dry._

_Richie actually does. He just sorta smiles and brings his attention back to the fries and ketchup on his plate._

_Richie sits across from Eddie in the booth. Eddie looks at him—watches as he puts his head down and says nothing more. Richie has been kind of quiet since they killed It. He couldn’t be the only one who noticed._

_“You’re quiet, Rich,” Eddie says aloud._

_He didn’t mean to._

_Richie blinks up at him, eyes wide for a moment._

_“No, I’m not,” he says, quick. But he looks around, and the rest of the Losers are all kind of nodding to themselves. “No—I’m not!” he says again._

_“Here, uh—uh—” Richie struggles to think. “Bill, your new girlfriend looks like if Pippi Longstocking got thrown in the dryer on tumble for an hour. Stan, you’ve got ketchup on your chin; you look like a dumbass. Ben, Bev’s eyes are on her face, and Eddie, I fucked your mom. And Mike…Mike, I’ve got nothing. You’re a delight and we’re glad to have you here.”_

_All the Losers start talking at once, in an uproar._

_“H-h-hey d-don’t talk about my—”_

_“Yeah, Stan, it’s like right—here, let me get it for you—”_

_“Richie, that’s not what we mea—”_

_Ben just stares wide-eyed down into his lap in horror._

_Richie stares back at Eddie out of the corner of his eye, donning his signature easy smirk that was absent before. Eddie smiles back._

_Richie kicks a foot out under the table. It hits Eddie’s leg, but gentle. Eddie kicks back, fondly._

_“Alright, alright—” Stan’s starting. “It’s late, and I gotta get back. For curfew—”_

_There are a couple audible groans._

_“C’mon Stan, you can stay a little longer—”_

_“No, come on, I can’t, I—”_

_“There’s only so many weeks left of summer, Stan. And Bev’s gonna be gone soon. Don’t you wanna make it last?” Mike asks._

_Richie stands up, unannounced. The diner was completely empty that night except for the Losers. And Walter the fry cook, who worked the late shift, but he was most likely asleep in the back room._

_Richie casually slides his way over to the jukebox. No one pays him any mind except Eddie out his periphery._

_“I know, I just really shouldn’t, I was grounded last week,” Stan continues. “’Sides. I’ve finished my fries, and now all there is to do is watch Rich and Eddie play footsie all night.”_

_The Losers laugh. Eddie, frowning, protests._

_“Hey—”_

_Just then, the music starts up, loud in the empty and otherwise quiet restaurant._

“Come on baby, let’s do the twist”

_Richie starts dancing back over to their table and Bev lets out a shriek of laughter. Mike starts clapping his hands together above his head and nodding along to the beat._

_A smile is growing on Eddie’s face._

“Come on baby, let’s do the twist”

 _“This is fucking_ not _making me want to stay any more than I did before, Tozier—”_

“Take me by my little hand, and go like this”

_Richie is reaching out in a flash and grabbing Eddie by the arms and pulling him up and out of the booth._

_Eddie dances with him without any protest. Bill’s hopping up out of the booth behind him—Ben, too, with a little encouragement, and there’s laughter, and Bev’s climbing up to twist on top of the table._

_Stan stays a little while longer._

**and if my wishes came true, it would’ve been you**

Eddie knocks on the door three times.

There’s a faint groan on the other side over muffled rock music. Eddie grimaces and bangs five more times.

_“Yeah, yeah, fuck, I’m comin’, I—”_

Eddie steps back and Richie opens the door.

“…Huh.”

An appropriate response, probably, to Eddie leaning against the porch column with a box of pizza in one hand and a bottle of scotch in the other, probably looking like he’d had more than his fair share of it before he came here.

He hadn’t, but he’d undone his tie and collar and untucked his shirt, sat on his couch and had a beer before deciding on coming here. After coming home from an outing with Bev and some fashion industry and artist friends—none of whom he knew before arriving there. The mingling was necessary and probably helpful but indescribably draining, especially knowing he wasn’t that good at it. And it had made him feel…he didn’t know how it made him feel. Probably not how social gatherings should.

“I didn’t order a pizza.”

“Hi. I know. But I brought it anyway.” Eddie tries to peer in the house. The music is blaring and the living room looks like a fucking mess. “I brought scotch, too, but maybe that one was a mistake. Wh—are you…?”

Richie sniffles and runs a hand through the messy locks of his hair.

“Oh, no. No, I’m not drunk. I know you people just assume I’m drunk all of the time, which means there’s about a fifty percent chance at any given time that you’re correct, but, nah. I actually just write better while I’m giving myself ear damage.”

Eddie listens for a second. “Is that Janis Joplin?”

“Uh-huh.”

Eddie shoots him a critical up-and-down. “You write better when you’re stoned, too?”

“I’m not _stoned_ ,” Richie bites. “And for the record, you don’t have to be stoned to listen to Janis Joplin. It just helps.”

Eddie swallows and lowers his voice.

“Hey, look, I brought a peace offering, alright? Can you…would you let me in?”

Richie’s eyes flash with—and though Eddie is a bit surprised by it he recognizes it immediately—hurt. He closes the gap between the door and the frame just a little bit more, his head fitting between it as he shrugs his shoulders, looking torn.

“I—I don’t know, man, I’ve got—I gotta get up early, I’m recording Fallon tomorrow, and—”

“Rich, please?” Eddie begs with his eyes, because that’s what used to work when they were kids and he’s got nothing else left. “Please.”

Richie clicks his jaw back and forth and studies him.

“Yeah, alright.” But Eddie doesn’t miss how it’s a little dry, and a little sad.

Richie kicks the front door open wide and steps away, into the living room. Eddie can see the entryway now. His jaw drops.

“You—”

“Yeah?”

All sixteen of Eddie’s pieces are hung high in an array on the front wall, beneath the insanely gaudy chandelier.

“You…” Eddie starts again, not knowing at all how to finish.

“I was kidding. About the…doormat thing.”

“I…see that.”

Eddie’s eyes move around the space slowly. He drinks it in. It’s a nice fucking house, but it’s no mystery that Richie’s the one that lives in it. It’s messy, and doesn’t look like an adult had a hand in decorating it. But, oddly (and though Eddie wouldn’t admit it out loud, because the place is filthy), it…has its charm. Or maybe it’s just the rush of familiarity he feels when he steps in through the door. This is _Richie’s space._ He lets that seep in; lives with it, for a moment.

His eyes land on the foyer table with the dirty ashtray, a framed picture of Richie, Bev and Ben on a hike in Malibu Creek, and a propped-up thank you note. Eddie’s finger runs trance-like down the dust gathered on the table, and across the picture frame—a memory he wasn’t there for. A part of Richie’s life that Eddie could have been a part of but wasn’t. His finger then lands on the card.

“Ah—” Eddie lifts his eyes. Richie is rubbing awkwardly at the back of his neck. “That’s uh, from Patty. She’s…I, uh, helped her out with some stuff, with…the funeral, and…after.”

Eddie’s eyes flash. “I didn’t know you helped with that.”

“A bit.”

There’s a stretch of quiet. Richie clears his throat.

“Come on. I’m actually fucking starving. You’re a saint.”

They sit and eat on the expensive-looking beanbag chairs in Richie’s living room. There’s movie and music posters hung about the room—much more haphazardly than Eddie’s paintings. There’s a bong sitting out on the coffee table, along with hemp wick and matches. The wet bar is a cluttered mess of half-empty bottles. The fireplace looks like it hasn’t been used since the place was bought. Eddie feels like he’s in a frat house. In Hollywood Hills.

“So,” Richie starts, mouth full of pepperoni pizza and pouring himself a shot. “Why are you here?”

Eddie swallows; sits up straighter. He breathes in, and he breathes out.

“I still don’t...love what you did, alright. I think you never developed healthy methods of communicating your feelings and the fact that you live in an absurd excess of wealth makes you think that the solution to every problem is just to throw your weight and money at it and see if it solves itself.”

Richie’s face falls. “You tricked me. You brought me this trojan horse pizza—”

_“But.”_

Richie shuts up.

“But you did come to my show,” Eddie meets Richie’s eyes. He can’t quite form a smile yet but at least he’s not frowning or screaming at him, so he’ll give himself the credit and call that some sort of progress. “And you were…I guess, in your own way, genuinely trying to be supportive. So…thank you. For that. And I’m…sorry for screaming at you. I was really upset, but that’s no excuse.”

Richie takes that in, and Eddie lets him. After a moment, Richie softly nods.

“So,” Eddie slaps his hands on his things. “Fallon tomorrow, huh?”

Richie swallows his food, not really looking up at him. “Yeah. I’ll do a little stand-up. Promotion for the special.”

“That’s exciting. I…wish I could say I’d seen it.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it.”

“What else have you been up to? Didn’t Bev tell me you got a movie deal, or so—”

“Just stop, will you?” Richie drops his pizza back onto his plate in irritation.

Eddie freezes, eyes going wide and heat rising to his cheeks in plain fucking embarrassment.

“Don’t fucking patronize me, man. Don’t give me this small talk because you feel bad now, or something. It’s weird.”

“I-I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” but he trails off.

They sit in the silence, and there’s a year of emptiness between them.

“Actually, uh,” Eddie starts when he feels braver, the nerves still wracking him. “To be honest with you, I, uh…I came here because my apartment’s really fucking dark and empty right now.”

Eddie can’t tell what the expression on Richie’s face means. So he keeps talking.

“A man can only watch so many _Friends_ re-runs by himself over holiday break without feeling rightfully fucking depressed about it,” Eddie elaborates with a small laugh. “I figured if I brought pizza and booze over, I’d have at least have a 50-50 shot at you talking to me. You’re pretty easy, if I remember right.”

He’d done something similar when they were kids, and Richie was in some mood, and Eddie’d just wanted to hear him laugh again. Pepperoni pizza had got him in the door, then.

Richie’s face twists as he nods, accepting Eddie’s story as the truth. He picks off a slice of pepperoni and pops it in his mouth.

“Don’t you have people you actually like you can talk to?” he asks. “Like Bill? Bev?”

Eddie raises his eyes to meet Richie’s again.

He doesn’t say anything, but Richie wipes his mouth with a napkin as he stares back at him and there’s some answer that goes unspoken there, Eddie supposes. Even if he’s not sure what it is.

Eddie leans forward and pours himself scotch. He swirls it around in the glass and sits back.

“My, uh…my mom’s dead.”

Richie stops; looks up. He raises his eyebrows.

“Just this last year?”

“No, but…recently. Stroke.” Eddie takes a long swig.

“How’re you doing?”

He puts the glass down and swallows.

“I’m fuckin’ lonely,” Eddie admits.

Richie looks up; sits up even more. He seems…alert.

“I’m lonely,” he says again, because saying it out loud to someone not his shrink feels distractingly good. Saying it to Richie feels better than good. “My mom’s dead. I divorced my wife. My boyfriend left me because I couldn’t give enough of a shit to stop him. The friends I moved out here for all have lives of their own. Ben and Bev want kids. Mike’s in Florida, Bill’s a free man.”

Eddie leans his head on his hand, staring at his scotch on the table.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But, _God,_ I’m so fucking alone.”

He doesn’t hear or doesn’t recognize the sound of Richie setting his glass back down on the table, or him getting up out of his seat—not until Richie’s mouth is latched onto his, and suddenly they’re kissing with a force that has Eddie slipping backwards on the beanbag chair slowly, awkwardly, until his head hits the hardwood floor with a painful _bonk_ and their lips separate. They both let out gasping laughs.

“Fuck—” Eddie _giggles._ Richie’s forehead rests against his chest, and the rest of his body, heavy on top of his, shakes with laughter.

Eddie looks down his nose with a smirk. “You comin’ on to me, Tozier?”

Richie raises his head and searches for Eddie’s lips again.

“Mm…I dunno. You want me to be?”

His breath hits hot on Eddie’s mouth and with their tongues shoved unceremoniously down each other’s throats, they manage to roll off the beanbag chair entirely and onto the hard floor.

“Mm—” Eddie breaks his lips away and Richie just starts mouthing at his neck instead. “No. No. I have standards. I’m not having sex on your filthy, bacteria-ridden floor. No amount of therapy is ever gonna make me okay with that.”

Richie braces his arms against the floor and stands up, Eddie instantly missing the heavy, commanding weight of him. He quirks an eyebrow down at him.

“Who said anything about having sex?”

For a moment, Eddie’s mouth falls open, and the embarrassment comes back fast.

Then, he realizes that that’s fucking _stupid._ And Richie can’t keep a straight face that long, anyway.

Richie waves a hand at him. “Nah, I’m just kiddin’. Hold on.”

He turns and pulls a blanket off the loveseat and moves to spread it on the floor. He throws a couple pillows down for good measure, too.

Eddie stands and starts taking off his clothes. Shirt first, then belt. Then he hears Richie give a sort of strained scoff from behind him, and he turns to look.

“What?” Eddie asks him, and Richie looks a bit offended.

“Can I participate? Am I allowed to participate in the sex? Or are you gonna do it all?”

“Wh—oh. Uh. Sorry. Thought it was quicker.”

Richie looks at him, shoulders falling a little.

It strikes Eddie that maybe that was the wrong thing to say.

Richie doesn’t say anything, though. Instead he opens the drawer of the end table to his right and pulls something out of it. Eddie sees it and raises an eyebrow.

“In your living room? Seriously?”

“I’m prepared for any emergency,” Richie says, unbothered. He tosses the lube and condoms down on the blanket. “And since you’re about to let me fuck you in my living room, you’ve actually proven me right.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “That’s fucking presumptive.”

Richie steps in front of him, grabs ahold of Eddie’s hipbone with one hand (fitting around more of Eddie’s flesh than he’d somehow anticipated, and _God_ is that distracting) and unbuttons and unzips his jeans with the other. He jerks his pants to the ground with one firm tug.

Eddie swallows.

“So, what do you want?” Richie asks standing in front of him, voice hard and thick and deeper than before.

Eddie can’t look at him when he says it. And his voice betrays him a little. “I just said it was presumptive.”

Richie just huffs amusement, and there, again, is his smirk. Easy, in spite of it all. Eddie can’t believe how fucking jealous he is of that smirk. Or how much he loves it. “Mmkay.”

Richie drops down to his knees. Eddie can’t look.

Well—he _can._ And he does—manages to tear his eyes downwards for short, brief little intervals that he’s sure makes him look like a fucking blushing virgin. But it’s too much. Like looking directly at the sun.

He expects Richie to get right down to brass tacks, because that seems about like the pace he’s moving at now. But he stops. Breathes. Stares at Eddie’s clothed, half-hard dick like he’s working up the courage to go through with it. Then he reaches up, and places his hands on the hem of Eddie’s boxers, and peels them down. Slowly. Like he’s worried he’ll get burned, or something, if he does it too fast.

That’s when Eddie stops being able to look.

Richie starts by flattening his tongue against the slit and Eddie’s dick moves to fully hard at fucking breakneck speed after that. Eddie gasps, and his body rocks, like the soul’s already been sucked out of him. Richie sinks his mouth around the rest of him, and it feels a little bit like dying.

Eddie blinks the feeling away and composes himself because—no. He’s not gonna do that. But it changes so much in the moment. The way that it doesn’t feel like sex should feel. The way that it harkens back to things Eddie doesn’t want to feel anymore, but also makes him want to stay suspended here, in this emotion, forever. The way that it feels both _better_ and _worse_ than anything he’s ever felt.

The way Richie does it, though, is mechanical in its precision. Takes him all the way down to the hilt and then pulls off completely one, two, three, maybe four times, and then is reaching up to pull Eddie down to the blanket with him. It’s exactly enough to get Eddie fully hard and leaking—enough to be a polite and considerate partner—but not enough to savor it. Not enough to sink in it.

Richie doesn’t feel it. The thing Eddie feels.

That’s fine.

Richie is busy kissing and biting on his neck and Eddie reaches over and grabs the bottle of lube determinedly. He lays back and fingers himself open, while Richie grinds on top of him and shucks off his own pants but nothing else.

Eddie lays there with Richie above him, and his own fingers stretching himself open, tender and agonizing, and he imagines that it’s Richie. Like he did last night, alone in his apartment, when Richie wasn’t there at all.

Richie mumbles little things into Eddie’s neck. Little, disparate things that don’t mean anything other than Richie’s obvious arousal. _“So hot”, “Like that,” “Feel good?”._

Richie’s big hands are on his hips again and there’s a gentle force there that makes them both stop and freeze.

Richie blinks.

“Can you, um…turn around?”

Eddie blinks.

“I…oh—uh, ye—I mean, wh—”

“I just…” and Richie softly sighs. “I’d rather you turned around.”

…

“…Right.”

Eddie does it—gets on his hands and knees, without further discussion.

He hears a quiet shuffling that’s maybe Richie unbuttoning and taking off his shirt. He then can hear Richie tear open a condom wrapper, and timing it in his head, expecting then to feel the head of Richie’s dick, instead there’s a beat that Eddie doesn’t expect where nothing happens, and there’s silence. He considers looking back and asking what the hold-up is, but before he can, he feels it press against him.

Richie does not start slow or gentle. He doesn’t hurt him on the initial thrust, but he’s swift and confident, and Eddie can’t believe the force of it. It pushes the air out of Eddie’s body—so much so that when Eddie opens his mouth in shock and pleasure, the moan comes out silent.

“C’mon, don’t be quiet,” Richie cajoles behind him, in a mocking tone that's so incredibly fucking sexy. And Eddie hadn’t intended to be. Quiet, that is. But he had a distinct lack of control over his body right now that both shocked and exhilarated him.

He corrects that, and makes a conscious effort to be as fucking audible as possible.

It’s not like it’s fake, though. He’d do that, sometimes, for other guys. Even Darren. He’d never, like, faked an orgasm or anything, but he’d exaggerate the noises. The whining and keening and moaning. He was pretty good at it.

Not here, though. He doesn’t need to. Richie’s….uhm. Big.

And more than just big—he makes a mental note to tell Bev that she was wrong about the _no sex_ thing, because Richie had to be having sex every goddamn day of his life to be so efficient at tearing someone apart like this. He’d heard of fucking out-of-body-experience sex, but this was… _God._

Richie’s palm trails flat up his spine and grabs him firm by the neck, pushing him down into the pillow as he continues thrusting smoothly behind him and the adjustment is some other kind of heaven. Two-thirds out and back in again, each thrust with the same force as the last, barely grazing his prostate in a tease that promised it later. He's obsessed with it; obsessed with the way Richie fucking him feels. How every way that sex makes him feel like an animal is exacerbated when it's Richie taking him. Without him having to tell him to go harder, or rougher. Richie knows. Richie knows he's not glass.

It’s not his fault that he loves it so much, that he starts grinding back against him.

 _“God_ , you want it,” Richie breathes, like he’s in awe of him. “Such a fucking slut for it.”

He’s been called names in bed before, though not recently. (Darren was too nice for it.) So it’s a bit of a shock that runs through him when he hears it, down to his toes. His whole body feels hot. He gives Richie a moan, as a thank you.

Then he reaches back behind him, grabs Richie’s wrist—the one with the hand that’s gripping his neck—and he pushes it aside. He starts to sit up and lean back, and Richie’s breath gets shallower as he does. Eddie sits in his lap and starts to ride him as Richie’s thrusting up, hitting his prostate now in earnest. Eddie’s back is flush against Richie’s chest, feeling the hot sweat and Richie’s choked breathing against the back of his neck. The soft feeling of Richie’s nose as it grazes the skin there—and the fact that Richie’s nearly whining now, too. Panting. In a way that sounds like…in a way that Eddie can hardly believe, because it sounds so desperate and broken. And it makes his heart swell in a way that will go unexamined because it happens in a rush; in this self-contained moment.

Eddie whines higher as the feeling starts mounting—the one he’d felt before but repressed. The way that sex with Richie felt a little bit like death. Like losing a little piece of himself that he’d never get back again. Like saying goodbye and bittersweet nostalgia. It feels decadent and hedonistic and wonderfully wrong. Like it’s betraying something—some trust, that he and Richie had silently agreed upon—but that’s too bad. He lets it mount and mount, and lets himself get high off it, and won’t apologize for it. Not to Richie and not to himself.

Eddie feels it when Richie comes and as he does, he reaches around and jerks Eddie off roughly and well, and in moments Eddie is following after him.

The feeling dissipates. It leaves some remnant inside him—latched on like a tumor—but it’s no longer so terribly overwhelming.

Richie’s damp forehead slumps down, resting on Eddie’s back for one, two, three breaths, and then Richie is pulling out and falling down on the blanket, Eddie right after him. Richie removes the condom, ties it, and tosses it in the trash bin before collapsing back down.

Richie claps off the lights in his living room—and Eddie certainly isn’t in the frame of mind to make fun of him for it, which is a shame. Instead, they’re lying there together in the silence.

 _“La petite mort,”_ Eddie remembers suddenly, from some book he’d read back in college. He whispers it into the dark, quiet living room, not really expecting it to be heard.

Richie rolls over half-asleep, his nose once again grazing the space between Eddie’s neck and shoulder.

“What’s that?” he mumbles, clearly not really aware of what he’s saying, or probably even that it’s Eddie he’s talking to.

Eddie dips into quiet, deciding how to answer him.

“It’s French,” Eddie settles on.

Because Richie didn’t need to know.

**in my defense, i have none for never leaving well enough alone**

Richie gets up maybe half an hour later after a quick power nap, and Eddie watches the outline of him in the dark blue light from the large open window as he walks nude over to the coffee table. There he grabs the bong, a small baggy of weed, the wick and his box of matches. He returns to the blanket.

“Want some?” he asks as he fills the bowl.

“Mm…water first,” Eddie croaks from the pillow as he rubs his eyes with his forearm.

Richie gives a dark half-chuckle and Eddie can see the white of his teeth. “Yes, your highness,” he teases, before getting up and walking the few steps over to the wet bar to pull a bottle from the mini fridge. He tosses it Eddie’s way, and he catches it.

“Can you throw me a wet towel, too?”

It’s pitch dark in that corner of the room but Eddie hears him turn on the sink and then walk back over. He reaches down and presents it to him wordlessly, and Eddie takes it and wipes off his stomach.

Eddie takes a swallow of water as he hears the click of the match and watches as it lights up Richie’s face from beneath—watches as Richie inhales the smoke and removes his lips, as the smoke spills from the top of the bong and finally out Richie’s mouth in something that’s disarmingly beautiful to look at in the low light.

Eddie sits up as Richie lies back down, holding it out for Eddie to take.

He does. He doesn’t know why, but he does. And after he’s done it, he lays back on the pillow next to Richie and waits to feel different.

It takes about fifteen minutes, and reaches its peak after about an hour. He doesn’t know what he hoped for. Some…revelation, maybe. It feels good and it relaxes him but in the hazy way that emotions when you’re high don’t seem to make much sense, it only makes the separation and the silence between him and Richie seem bigger. And maybe it’s just a bad mix with his anxiety but it’s making him hyper-fixate on earlier that night when Richie’d asked him to turn over. And then he starts thinking about why the hell he thought coming here tonight was a good fucking idea in the first place. And then he just starts to hate himself.

Richie falls back asleep soon. Eddie’s pretty touch-and-go for the next few hours. And when he reaches over and opens up his phone and it reads, _“1:00 a.m.”,_ he makes a decision.

He picks his clothes up off the ground and is careful about not making much noise when he puts them on. He might be too loud when he stands up, though. Richie shifts and moans a little.

“Hey,” comes the sleep-dreary voice, and Eddie feels a hand reach out and tug at his shirt. “Where you going?”

“I’m just gonna…” Eddie starts, not really able to make out Richie’s face in the dark, and not particularly wanting to. “I know you’ve got an early…thing, so. I’ll see you around.”

“…Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“Thanks. I…”

“Yeah.”

Eddie pulls the bottle of scotch off the coffee table, and sees himself out.

**i have this dream you’re doing cool shit**

“I don’t get it.”

Bev bites her lip. “Well, he’s in New York right now but he wanted me to ask you permission.”

Eddie narrows his eyes. “Why didn’t he just call and ask me himself?”

Bev looks like she wishes he hadn’t asked that. “Something about deleting your number.”

Eddie nods, defeated. Right. He…probably deserved that much.

He glances down at Bev’s phone sitting face-up and open on his coffee table. It’s promotional concept art for Richie’s upcoming special. It’s Richie. Standing in front of a wall of _his_ art. The ones he bought.

“He also wants to incorporate it into the set design for the tour,” she says. “Obviously, he’d pay you quite a bit for it. He said he’d have someone get in touch with you in the next few days to negotiate the license fee and sign an agreement.”

Eddie shakes his head.

“I don’t get it. Why is he doing this?”

He can feel Bev studying his reaction.

“I mean, it looks really dope. That’s probably one reason.”

She wasn’t lying. It did.

“Maybe it’s also…I don’t know, an apology?” she says it with after a sigh, like a pointed nudge. Like she couldn’t believe how dense Eddie was being. Which was probably fair.

“He didn’t need to do _this,_ though.”

Bev is quiet for a long time. Eddie still feels her looking at him, though his eyes haven’t moved from her phone.

“He’s doing a lot better, you know,” she tells him. Eddie looks up at her for that. “The drinking. Moping around. Being bitter. It’s still there, but, like, barely. At least he doesn’t sound like a petulant child anymore.”

Eddie blinks away; casts his eyes down in a far-off corner of the room.

He’s really glad to hear it. He’s _so_ glad to hear it. Any news of Richie in nearly a month was…so, so good. But all this was…he didn’t know how to take it.

“I know he wishes things were different between you. Even if he won’t admit it,” Bev says.

Eddie swallows.

“Yeah, but they’re not,” he says, stiff. Pushing away the feeling that says he’s lying to himself. The feeling that can’t remember why _he’s_ even angry at Richie anymore. Just that he is. And that whenever he thinks about him or says his name, there’s pain there. And a deep, aching hurt. “They are what they are.”

Maybe there’s really no reason anymore. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s his fault. Maybe it’s Richie’s. Maybe people just change when they get older, and grow apart, and that’s that.

**you meet some woman on the internet and take her home**

Bev and Ben host Christmas dinner at theirs. Eddie brings some elaborate sweet potato dish with goat cheese with some recipe he got off the New York Times, because he actually likes to cook and it’s an excuse to make it look like he does it more than he actually does.

Bev opens the front door wide and kisses him on both cheeks when she sees him and ushers him in. There’s Christmas music playing and a pretty fair commotion going on inside. Ben and Bev had a lot of friends.

Mike’s there—flew in from Florida yesterday. He’s in the living room with a beer in his hand talking to Bill, and smiles big when he sees Eddie. The ending of _It’s A Wonderful Life_ is playing on the TV.

It makes him feel warm inside, talking to Mike. They haven’t seen each other in half a year, and only exchanged texts and emails. They sit and talk for maybe an hour, about Mike’s new home in Florida, about art therapy, about politics and Bill’s new book (to Bill’s chagrin).

Eddie forgets that Richie hasn’t arrived yet, until he does.

Not alone.

Eddie overhears the conversation at the front door, eyes boring holes through the way Richie’s face is so fucking bright and full of laughter.

“Bev, this is Michael. I know, it’ll be very confusing.”

Michael is built like a Greek statue under an endearingly hideous Christmas sweater and has perfect bone structure. He is blonde. Shorter than Richie but not by much. And he’s fucking polite, because he shakes Bev’s hand with a warm, open smile and they begin some inane small talk and Bev’s fucking _blushing._

Traitor.

“Especially because I know _someone_ flew in from Florida last night— _there he is!”_

Richie is rushing into the living room with open arms, blowing past Eddie and wrapping his arms all the way around Mike, rocking him back and forth as Mike laughs and his beer sloshes over the mouth of the bottle.

“Whoa-hoa! Hey!”

 _“IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou,_ Mike. Gah, I missed you so much, man. Hey—you want to meet Other Mike? He’s not as hot as you, but we all gotta make do somehow. Hey, Bill, how’s it going? Hey, Eddie.”

“Oh, sure, sure, bring him over—”

“Hey! Hey, Michael! Yeah, hey, babe, get over here!”

Eddie tries to blink away how surreal the whole fucking thing feels. Dissociate himself from the moment. But he’s got a death grip on his wine glass that’s threatening to shatter it. At the very least, Bev has the mind to throw him a sympathetic glance as she turns away from the door.

Michael is nice. He’s a software engineer. He seems genuinely interested in Richie and his friends. So every revelation is pretty much worse than the last.

It’s not until they’re all sitting down to dinner that Eddie realizes something. Realizes the way the night has dragged on, and the way Michael’s smile and laugh are both very _polite_ but nothing more than that, and the way he diverts most every conversation back to Richie and away from himself, and the way he tells some political joke that Eddie’s pretty sure he saw reposted on Facebook a couple times last month, and the way that Richie _laughs_ at it. Leans into him, puts a hand on his big, muscly forearm, and actually laughs.

Eddie’s eyes light up over his champagne flute.

Michael is _boring._

That’s when Eddie actually starts to snicker to himself. If anyone had been paying him any attention then, he’d probably look like a maniac. But Richie’s going on, telling some story now about some show on tour, and Eddie’s grinning into his glass as he drinks.

He had to give it to Richie, he had him scared there for a moment. And he wouldn’t find it so funny if he hadn’t long come to terms with the fact that he’d gone and done the same thing with Darren. Someone lovely and perfect and horribly fucking sweet that it makes your teeth rot, but _God,_ he was nothing like Richie, that’s for sure. And at the time, he thought that was exactly what he fucking needed. It wasn’t, but it was fun while it lasted.

He catches Richie later, while Michael has Bill cornered and is asking him a litany of questions about his book, because, to Bill’s horror, he’s found a superfan. He finds him out on the balcony by himself, leaning over the rail and cupping a warm cocktail.

“Hi,” Eddie starts, simply. Cautiously. He doesn’t want to send Richie running.

“Hi,” is the response. Richie, at least, acknowledges him with his eyes. Also seeming exceedingly cautious, but not telling him to go fuck himself. And, well, that’s not nothing.

“Think it’s gonna snow?” Eddie asks wryly.

Richie shakes his head. “Sorry? Never heard of it. That a New York thing?”

Eddie walks up to put his hands on the rail next to him. “Um, I wanna thank you. The…art thing. Easily the best Christmas gift I’ve ever gotten. So…thanks, that was…that was really cool.”

“Oh, no, you don’t have to…uh,” Richie says, sniffling in the cold air. “It worked really well, and, uh…you deserved it, anyway. That shit’s cool, and I…yeah. No, uh, I was happy to do it.”

Eddie takes another sip of wine. He nods in Richie’s direction.

“You seem happy. Happier.”

Richie quirks an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Eddie laughs a little. “You’ve got a, uh, glow about you.”

“Thanks, it’s the anti-depression meds.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Turns out, they kinda work. Who knew.”

Eddie smiles. “I thought it might be all the sex you’re having.”

Richie laughs at that from the belly. He doesn’t actually say anything, though.

“And I know it’s gotta be good, too, or else he wouldn’t be here.”

Richie stops. Turns. Looks at him. He squints.

“What’d you just say?”

Eddie scoffs, halfway to another sip of his wine.

“Come on. You don’t like that guy.” Eddie drinks.

Richie’s face pinches together and his head cranes forward, and he turns to face Eddie fully now.

“What the fuck?”

Eddie shakes his head. “What?”

“How the fuck is that your problem? If I like him or not? Huh? How exactly does that affect you?”

“Richie, I just—”

“You _just._ No, stop. Don’t you fucking say anything about it. Pay me the same courtesy I paid you when I was such a fucking good sport about you coming over to my house and using me for sex last month.”

Eddie shakes his head more vigorously now. Denying it not because it isn’t completely, nakedly true, but because if he doesn’t, Richie won’t get it. Won’t understand that it wasn’t _like_ that.

“No, I wasn’t—I just came over because I was lonely, I didn’t know—"

Richie’s jaw goes hard. “Yeah. You came over to get fucked and feel something. Which I can understand well enough, but don’t pretend like it was something else. You knew what you were doing, knocking on my door at nine at night looking like…that. With your stupid booze and pizza. Like when we were kids. I had your fucking number the minute I opened that door. You knew. Just like me at your fucking art show.”

Eddie’s eyes narrow; become a question. Richie’s shoulders drop and his gaze just gets angrier. He’s not drunk or anything near it but he’s got enough booze in his system (and maybe enough ground to stand on) that’s making him talk like this, so openly.

“You were right, Eddie. I went there to make a fucking scene. Make it about me.” Richie swallows. “It was wrong, and it was fucked, but I meant to do it, and it felt _great.”_

Richie spits it in his face. Spiteful and cruel, and clearly nothing more than a grand joke to him now. Eddie flinches.

“And you know what, it worked. Every word you screamed at me that night felt fucking amazing. I’d rather you hate me than…than _nothing._ Than _indifference.”_

“I don’t hate you,” Eddie says in earnest.

“Yeah, you do,” Richie counters, dispassionately. “If you don’t, you’re fuckin’ cruel. Every time you look at me it’s like you wish you hadn’t remembered me at all.”

That hits like a slap, and Eddie recoils, like it’s physical.

Because oh, God. Oh, God, it might be true.

“And I told you,” Richie goes on, “that’s fine. I’ll take it. Just…let me fuckin’ live my life. You know it’s hard enough for me as it is, tryna get over you, you don’t have to fucking rub it in my face like you don’t care. I’m _trying,_ alright? Isn’t that what you fucking wanted?”

Richie starts to walk away, shoulder-checking him and heading for the door.

Eddie sputters. _“What I_ —what are you fucking talking about?”

Richie spins around; points at him. Every word punches out of his mouth with a force of deep, prolonged rage like Eddie’s never known. There are the beginnings of tears in Richie’s eyes that Eddie knows he doesn’t want him to see.

“You said forget it. And every day of my life since then I’ve tried. Okay? I can’t. I can’t. I _love_ you. Since I knew what that fuckin’ word meant. It’s so fucking ingrained into who I am I don’t know how to separate it anymore. And you know that. So excuse me if I don’t fucking _like_ the guy I brought over for dinner tonight. Of course I fucking don’t. Don’t you dare judge me.”

He feels the sound of the slamming screen door deep in the pit of him.

Richie keeps his distance the whole rest of the night. Won’t speak to him, won’t look at him. Bev puts away dishes in the kitchen like a worrywart—shooting glances Eddie’s way while she does that just say she _knows._

Later, when everyone’s gone, she pours him a much more generous glass of wine, and herself one too, and lets him cry at her breakfast bar.

**we never painted by the numbers baby, but we were making it count**

_“How long’s your mom out of town for?” Richie asks it while he lays back on Eddie’s bed, tossing a baseball in the air absently. Eddie leans with his back against the closed door. The_ closed door. _He can barely believe it. If his mom were home, he’d never hear the end of it._

_“The whole weekend,” the grin grows on Eddie’s face as he says it out loud._

_Richie leans up on his forearms. “Yeah?” he smirks. “Whaddya wanna do?”_

_Eddie bites his lip. “I wanna buy cigarettes.”_

_Richie’s eyebrows threaten to take flight._

_They venture out to the gas station on the edge of town, where the guy that’s working behind the counter probably doesn’t know that they’re 17 and not 18. Richie’d gotten a fake ID this year from some guy in his twenties that made Bev’s back in the day. They weren’t good, but they usually worked, anyway._

_Richie gets a pack of Budweiser, too, for good measure._

_They go and lay in an open field and crack them open, and Richie places Eddie’s first cigarette between his lips, and pulls out his lighter._

_Eddie watches him intently. His face is closer than it really should be._

_“Now you gotta listen to me, alright. Your first smoke is not gonna be good. Your lungs are gonna feel like death, and you’re gonna cough for about two minutes straight, and you’re gonna hate me afterwards because you’re gonna think I’m part of some grand American conspiracy to trick you into thinking that people actually like cigarettes.”_

_“Is there a ‘but’ coming…?”_

_“No. Cigarettes are bad for you and taste like shit.” Richie shrugs. “Make you look real cool, though.”_

_It goes about exactly how Richie told him it was gonna go. But Eddie doesn’t give up so easily. His mom was gone and that rarely ever happened, so he was going to live today to its fullest._

_Also, it was not the first time that it had occurred to him that next summer they would be done with high school, and Richie would be packed and off to California, and Eddie would be stuck here to go to school in-state._

_A year did not seem like enough time._

_Eddie takes another pull on the cigarette. It’s…slightly better than the last time. Slightly. He still has to wait another minute until the coughing subsides so he can go again. The third time, though, is smooth. Eddie smiles._

_Richie is watching. Leaning back in the grass, drinking his beer. And watching._

_“It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” Eddie decides. “But…I don’t know. I don’t think it’s for me.”_

_Richie chews on his bottom lip._

_“That’s a shame,” he says. “You look hot, doing it.”_

_Eddie’s eyes blink and go big. Richie’s flash a little too. But he turns and looks away so fast that Eddie can’t really read his face after that._

_Richie puts his own cigarette out in the dirt and takes a swig of beer. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the rest of the carton, and his lighter. He shoves them both into Eddie’s hands._

_“Here. Keep ‘em under your bed where she won’t look.”_

_Eddie looks down, confused._

_“…Why? Don’t you want ‘em?”_

_“I’ll get more.”_

_“I told you, I don’t think I’m gonna—”_

_“You don’t think, but one of these days, she’s gonna say something or do something that’s gonna make you want to do nothing more than smoke a fucking cigarette.”_

_Eddie thought about it. And the more he did, the more he thought Richie was probably right. And the more thoughtful he realized it was. Richie was giving him a form of rebellion. That wasn’t him. For when he was gone and Eddie was lost and alone._

_“One pack’s not gonna give you lung cancer,” Richie tells him, all reassurance and no teasing. Because he knows Eddie and knows his mind well enough to know that that’s his only other hesitation. Wouldn’t ever make fun of it because that’s not who he is._

_Eddie stares back at him and his eyes are wide in awe and he thinks about the gesture._

_Eddie wishes he’d told him something there. But he can’t remember what._

**you know the greatest loves of all time are over now**

He still has the lighter.

_Bang, bang, bang! Bang bang! Bang, bang, bang!_

Eddie’s head snaps up from his computer at his desk as he stands up and walks out his bedroom, with half a mind to grab his baseball bat. He doesn’t, because despite his surprise, he thinks he knows who it is.

He peers out the peephole on his apartment door. He sighs. He unlocks it and swings it open.

_“What—”_

“Where is it?” Richie brushes past him and walks in through the front door without his permission. He’s vibrating; shaking with energy that is…maybe anger? Eddie’s not too sure what there is even _left_ that he could possibly be angry at him about, but who knows.

Eddie shakes his head. “Where’s what, Richie?”

“Don’t play dumb. Bev told me.”

He is not doing this today. He doesn’t have the fucking energy. He’s tired, running on little-to-no sleep and has half a paper to write by tomorrow.

“I have no idea what you’re fucking talking about Richie, could you please—”

“Where’s the painting, _asshole?”_

“N—” Eddie stops. “No.”

Richie’s scouring the fucking room. Turning over blankets and looking under couches.

“Stop. Richie, stop.”

Richie walks over to him.

“Show it to me. Just show it to me.”

“No. No—why should I?”

“Because I want to see it.”

“Well, that’s not good enough!” Eddie yells.

That gets Richie to stop, at least, and shut up and breathe.

“You said your peace, well _fine._ Now I’m gonna say mine,” Eddie says, with a voice he can’t recognize as his own. “You’ll never fucking see that painting. Not after I’m dead. Call me an asshole, call me a snide, cocky, jealous prick, call me a…a fucking slut who sleeps around and doesn’t know what he wants, okay, I don’t _care._ It doesn’t matter, because whatever I am, whatever confusion or heartache I caused you, it’s _your fucking fault_ anyway, because the one day I knew— _actually knew_ —for the first time maybe in my whole life what _I_ wanted, without anyone deciding it for me, you threw that back in my face and told me it wasn’t good enough.”

Richie’s chin raises. He squares his jaw. Like he’s appraising Eddie, or…seeing him for the first time. His lips part a little. His eyes go softer.

“Anyway, Richie, I-I—” some wave washes over him and Eddie loses all the confidence. Everything that made him sure. He can’t even look at him anymore when he says: “I think you should go.”

He hears Richie’s steps on the hardwood floor. Eddie looks up as Richie gets too close.

Richie’s mouth opens and shuts, as if he wants to say something but can’t, and his hands twitch at his sides, as if he wants to touch him, but can’t.

Richie ends up sighing and passing Eddie as he heads to the door, the spicy smell of his cologne lingering for only the briefest moment.

Eddie watches as he turns back in the doorframe.

“Sorry,” Richie says, voice gravelly and quiet. But honest. “Shouldn’t’ve come.”

He leaves.

Eddie thinks about it. He doesn’t think Richie really meant today.

**and it’s another day, waking up alone**

“No, I don’t need a box of my old shirts. I told you to sell it. I know you know I told you that. Myra, I told you. Don’t call me at this number. Don’t message me on Facebook. I don’t want to hear from you. No—No, I don’t care! I don’t care. I’m hanging up and I’m blocking your number, do you understand me? I’m not fucking around. That’s it—end of story. Goodbye.”

He hangs up and tosses the phone across the bed, and turns around and screams into his pillow.

When he wakes up the next morning, the bed feels emptier for some reason. Even though it’s no emptier than it had been the days or weeks or months before. But he’s still too tired to think about it.

He takes his coffee on his porch and watches the sunrise with his feet kicked up on the rail.

He buys groceries that day for the week. More frozen meals because classes have him busy and without time to cook. The lines are long and the whole thing’s a drag that takes him most of the afternoon.

He takes a bath that night because his muscles are sore and he fucking deserves it. He doesn’t have the energy to think about sex or put his hand anywhere near his dick.

He reheats leftovers and watches _Frasier_ on his couch.

He crawls into bed and turns off the light.

It goes on.

**if one thing had been different, would everything be different today?**

It’s three in the morning. Eddie can barely keep his eyes open. The phone rings on the other end five times. But he’s not worried, even for a second, that it won’t be picked up.

The first thing Richie says when he answers is: _“Make me understand why you’re calling me right now.”_

“Richie, I don’t wanna fight,” he mumbles into the speaker. “I’m tired. I’m out of it. Can we not…that’s not why I called.”

 _“So why did you call?”_ Richie demands, still tense.

“…You alone?”

 _“Yeah,”_ Richie swallows the word.

Eddie plays with the hem of his shirt, working up the courage again.

“’Want you.”

And Eddie should feel guilty for it. Eddie should feel so, _so_ fucking guilty for doing this to him. But it’s three in the morning and he doesn’t have inhibitions anymore. Just wants.

 _“Eddie…”_ Richie groans. It’s a little sad that Eddie already knows, with that one sound, that he’s won.

“Doesn’t have to be complicated,” he knows it’s a lie but he can’t bring himself to care. “Just pretend it’s not. Like…like the car ride never happened.” It’s an impossible ask. He knows that, too.

_“I don’t…I don’t think that that’s a good idea.”_

“No, it’s a great one,” Eddie says. “You know, I can still feel your cock rocking into me like it was yesterday.”

 _“Eds.”_ It’s a warning.

“I didn’t tell you the way it felt,” Eddie goes on, not heeding it. “I never told you.”

He listens for the hitched breath. Waits. The corner of his mouth pulls up when it comes. Eddie reaches down with his other hand and starts palming himself.

_“…How did it feel?”_

_“God,_ so good. Best thing I’ve ever felt. And a little bit of the worst, because it…I knew I wasn’t ever gonna feel it again. That it couldn’t ever be replicated. And that felt like a piece of me was born and then died right in that moment.”

He grinds up into the feeling of his hand, breathing heavy. The only other sound is the sound of the trees rustling outside his window. For a long, long time.

_“Eddie, I have to hang up.”_

“Don’t.”

_“No, I have to. I can’t…I can’t be with you like this, okay? It’s not right.”_

“It’s fine. Richie, it’s fine—”

_“No. Okay? I wish you hadn’t told me that.”_

“Richie—”

_Click._

**and it would’ve been sweet, if it could’ve been me**

When Eddie next goes for his morning run, he doesn’t attempt to lie to himself about where he’ll end up at the end of it.

That’s what gives him the strength to be sitting so openly on the curb outside of Richie’s house, airpods in his ears, and staring out at the street.

_“So far away,”_

_“Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?”_

_“It would be so fine to see your face at my door—”_

It’s about fifteen minutes sitting there before the left earbud is taken out of his ears and Richie sits down on the curb next to him.

There’s a beat of silence as the song plays.

“…Is that Carole King?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you, a lesbian?” Richie deadpans.

He hands the airpod back.

“Is it okay that I’m here?” Eddie asks.

“Sure,” Richie shrugs.

“Boyfriend’s not gonna come out here and beat my face in?”

Richie fishes into his pocket and pulls out a cigarette and lays it between his lips.

“Don’t have a boyfriend.”

Eddie nods. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out Richie’s lighter, and before Richie can light it himself, he reaches over and does it for him.

There’s a beat where Richie glances down at it, but he doesn’t say anything other than “Thanks.”

“Still,” Eddie says. “Sorry about last night. I had no right to do…that, and—”

“Yeah, let’s not talk about it,” Richie bites at him instantly, like a scared, wild dog.

Richie takes a drag. It seems to calm him down a bit. His shoulders fall.

“I have a hard time accepting love at face-value,” Richie tells him, beaten down. “My therapist dropped that bomb on me yesterday. Feel like I coulda used that little nugget of information a while ago, but hey.”

It feels almost like an apology. As close as Eddie’s ever gotten or ever expects to get, anyway. He’ll accept it.

“Therapist?” Eddie asks.

“Yeah. Turns out it’s not for suckers.”

“I’m glad. I’m glad you’re doing that,” Eddie says honestly. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and…Richie, I was really hurt that day, but I never…never took into account the pain you must’ve went through, and I—”

“Stop,” Richie says, but it’s soft. “You don’t gotta.”

“No, I mean…I’m just glad you’re getting help, is all. I know how hard it was for me.”

“Yeah. Well, thanks.”

Eddie swallows. “And I know it’s maybe not ever gonna be your first choice, but I want you to feel like you can talk to me about it. If you ever need, or…just want to.”

Richie doesn’t say anything at first but Eddie hopes he hears him.

“…Thank you,” comes later.

Eddie thinks. There’s a sunrise over the palms in the Hills and he watches that for a while, while the cold breeze hits and Richie smokes.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out with Michael.”

“Eh, no, you’re not.”

“No, I am,” Eddie looks at him. “I really am. I…I was jealous, but that’s on me. And I wish…I want you to be happy,” he settles on.

There’s quiet. Richie turns his head and considers him; sizes him up. He puts out his cigarette on the street.

“Yeah, well, he didn’t make me happy.”

Richie’s stare makes him feel thirteen again. And it makes him wish things were that easy.

“…Do you think it’s all we know how to do anymore?” Eddie asks, staring at the cracks in the pavement. “Fight?”

“We’re reverting,” Richie says. “That’s what my shrink calls it, anyway. Reverting back to the language we communicated in as kids.”

“We’re not kids anymore,” Eddie mumbles. His bottom lip quivers while he can’t decide why he feels so sad about it.

His childhood wasn’t anything great. Pretty shit, all things considered. Only good part of it was also the worst part. Doesn’t make sense that he should feel like this.

Richie was there before the worst stuff though. And through it. And after it.

And he was here now.

“Yeah, I know.” Richie sniffles. “Maybe we move on. Try somethin’ different.”

Eddie really thinks about what it is he wants to say here, before he says it.

“I don’t know…how to move on from the way I feel about you,” he says. “I don’t know how to abandon that and start over again.”

Richie shakes his head.

“I don’t either,” he breathes.

And then, Eddie supposes, that’s really it. There’s just nothing much more to say.

Richie, clearly feeling that too, waits until the sun finishes rising to stand up and pat Eddie uncomfortably on the shoulder. It’s the coldest touch that Eddie’s ever felt.

“See ya around, Eds,” he says. An empty promise. Distant and hopeless, and complacent with the indefinite open-endedness of it.

Richie heads back inside.

**in my defense, i have none for digging up the grave another time**

He decides to do it somewhere in the psychedelic, barely lucid hours between three and four in the morning. You know, the time when he’s historically made all of his best decisions.

He covers all his smoke alarms with shower caps. He puts down flame-resistant tarp in his living room and pushes all his furniture away. He drags the painting out of the closet, and he takes Richie’s lighter, and he sets the fucking thing on fire.

The canvas burns from the middle, and the colors of Richie’s face melt into each other, blending into something completely new and unrecognizable, and Eddie watches it with curiosity and shameless pride.

**but it would’ve been fun, if you would’ve been the one**

When he’s done with his classes for the year, Bev throws him a little party at some local gastropub. It’s one of the best gifts that he thinks has ever been given him, because he didn’t have to say hardly anything at all for her to know that he just…needed this.

It’s small. Just Bev, Ben, Bill, and a few other friends, from class and who he’d become close with through Bev. Mike walks in through the doors at the eleventh hour, and Bev _swears_ she didn’t know, but Eddie doesn’t quite believe her.

“No, God, I—I really have to thank you all, because,” Eddie’s standing in front of their table because he’d felt the need to say _something,_ but now Bill had gone and made a big deal out of it by inciting the others in demanding, _“Speech! Speech! Speech!”._

“Because this has been, you know, in spite of a lot, the…the best year of my life. I have…completely reinvented myself, and I’m…happy. And I have a lot to be proud of, but there are days when all I wanted to do was just…break down and cry. Y’know, give up. And we all have to feel sorry for ourselves every once in a while, but you have to have people in your life to pull you up out of that hole. And I have you. And for most of my life, I had no one. And there’s nothing…there’s no words that truly convey how thankful I am for that. So…”

There’s applause, and drinking. And food. And then there’s the rest of the night.

“Eddie,” Bev puts a hand on his shoulder as the other hand holds her cocktail. “Richie really wanted you to know he wanted to be here.”

“Where’s he t-t-touring right now? Chicago?” Bill asks over the sound of the bar.

“Yeah, I think, and then next week he’s in Austin…after that I have to pull out the text he sent me, hold on…”

Eddie lets the noise drown it all out. He hasn’t yet and doesn’t bother mentioning to her that he and Richie have not spoken, once again, in months. There wouldn’t be a point, anyway. She’d just worry, and there wasn’t any need for that anymore.

He takes another sip of his drink.

_“Excuse me? Excuse me!”_

The party quiets down a bit. Eddie has to finish his long, long swig before he can turn and look at the waiter trying to get their attention from across the room. He’s the last to look.

“Hi. Hello. I need…to speak to Eddie.”

It’s not the waiter.

The room has devolved into silence, and the distant sound of clinking dishes. Every person in the room looks back to where Eddie sits at the bar.

Eddie is frozen in the shock, and physically can’t move from where he is. But also, and perhaps more importantly, he _won’t._ Because if he does, he’ll slip back into the person he was months ago, and he _can’t._ He’d come so far.

Richie sees this, and nods.

“Okay, fine. Fine. Whatever. Fuck it. I’m used to speaking in front of crowds, anyway. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, how’re we doing tonight?”

The filled bar raises up their glasses. There’s a resounding, affirmative crowd sound of _“good”_ or _“pretty good”._

“Great. That’s great. I’ll, uh, I’ll only take a few minutes of your time here today, and then you can get back to the general drunkenness and merrymaking.”

He locks eyes with Eddie again. He points an accusatory finger.

“I,” he starts, definitively, “am not letting you get rid of me. How about that?”

Next to him, Bev winces into her glass and puts her head in her hand.

“Oh my God, he’s doing the scene from _Jerry Maguire,”_ she groans.

“I’ve done a lot of thinking,” Richie continues. “And maybe…maybe we were both stuck in the past. Lots of people are. You know. That’s life. You establish things at a certain age, and then you just…spend your whole life trying to get that feeling back and you never can.”

“But you taught me something. That it doesn’t have to be like that. Look at you, you’re…you’re amazing. You’re the best person I know. Look at the life you live now, you— _you_ did that for yourself. So, you know what I can’t figure out? Why we’re two people, that love each other, and we won’t even _try._ We just fucking lie down, and…and give up. ‘ _Oh, life’s just sad, and that’s just the end of it. Boo-fucking-hoo. Poor us.’”_

“Richie—”

“Well, I don’t accept that!” he talks louder, over him. It’s probably for the best. Eddie wasn’t even sure of what he wanted to say. “I don’t. I love you too much. And, you know what? You love me, too.”

It’s accusatory, like he thought Eddie might be ready to argue it.

“For a while there I thought maybe I was kidding myself. You know, that I was just in love with the memory of you. But that’s not true. I love you now. I love your smile. I love your voice, I love your laugh. I love the way you yell at me. I love the…the art that you do that I don’t understand—but I want to. I love the way you smell. I love how fucking funny you are. I love your tight, cute little body. I love your O-face.”

There’s some scandalous murmuring in the crowd. Eddie tries his best to stifle his laughter.

“And I miss you.”

Richie says it and Eddie’s reached the point where he can no longer swallow down the tears.

“I missed you for thirty years. _So_ fucking—just an ache I didn’t know I had. And now I miss you. I still miss you. I miss you every day, like nuts. Every day since I found you again. And there’s still just…nothing. Nothing between us. Twenty-seven years, we let that get away from us, and then…and then we…”

Richie’s broken voice peters out. Eyes red and wet, he swallows, and shakes his head.

“Just don’t make me leave here alone again.”

There’s quiet.

Eddie steps down from off the barstool. The entire bar watches every step he takes around the long table towards Richie. And Richie watches, too.

Eddie stops in front of him, and looks up. Richie’s eyes are nervous.

Eddie moves a hand up Richie’s chest to the back of his neck, pulls him down, and they’re kissing.

The bar breaks out in loud cheers, in the clinking of glasses, and that filters out into regular chatter again. Eddie is far more concerned with the feel of Richie’s mouth. And they separate and Richie’s arms wrap around him in the tightest, most possessive embrace, his face buried in Eddie’s neck.

Richie stays for the rest of the night. Ben gets him a drink and he pulls up a chair. Towards midnight, when the restaurant is near ready to kick them out, Richie and Eddie walk out to the parking lot together, fingers and hands linked. They say goodbye to Bev, Ben, Bill and Mike, and walk alone.

“So,” Richie starts. “You wanna come on tour with me, or should I cancel?”

“No, no, don’t cancel,” Eddie’s saying. “’Course I’ll go with you.”

“Yeah?” Richie smiles.

“Yeah.” Eddie returns it. Easily.

Richie’s gaze lingers, along with his giddy grin.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” he starts. “What ever happened to that painting?”

Eddie looks back at him, with a purposefully indecipherable spark behind his eyes.

“I burned it.”

Richie’s face is brief shock.

“You b—” Then, Richie starts laughing hysterically. He wipes tears from his eyes. “You burn—you _burned it!_ You over-dramatic little shit. Oh, God. Oh, God, that’s good.”

**Author's Note:**

> VOTE.
> 
> I am rachelamberish on tumblr. Come talk to me 👉👈🥺


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